There I was, trying different approaches to capture a good exposure. But, the sky was so gray that my efforts seemed to be in vain. For example, exposing for the foreground yielded a featureless (and colorless) sky. Exposing for the sky resulted in a gray sky with a few lighter gray features, but a very dark foreground. Alas, not even a composite of these varied exposures helped. It seemed that there was nothing I could do about a sky that just wasn’t interesting. Yet, I liked the image for the feeling of height, the winding road, and the river. And that’s when I remembered the Cloud filter!

While this effect isn’t for every image (for example, it can make bigger skies look somewhat fake), the technique is useful for images with just a bit of sky (like mine).

Step 1: Set the Color

Open your image in Photoshop Elements and press D to set the colors to their defaults. Select the Eyedropper tool (I) and sample a blue from your image.

Step 2: Create a New Layer for the Clouds

Create a new layer (e.g., Layer>New>Layer). Next, select Filter>Render>Clouds to create a clouds layer. Then, set the blending mode to Multiply.

Step 3: Adjust for Realism

The goal of this technique is to add interest without distracting from the overall image. So, we’ll blur the sky and remove clouds from areas where there shouldn’t be any. Likewise, the intensity of color in the sky should be in agreement with the rest of the image so that our addition of clouds isn’t too obvious. Therefore, we’ll adjust the opacity down:

1. Select Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur and set the Radius to 50%.
2. Select the Eraser tool (E) and choose an appropriately sized brush for your image from the brush picker (for the example, I chose the soft 300 brush and adjusted the size up to 700). Where there should be no clouds (like on mountains, trees, the ground, etc.), erase them. However, be sure to leave the clouds on reflective surfaces — like water.
3. Adjust the opacity of the image down to a point where the sky appears realistic. For the example, I’ve adjusted it down to 30%

Step 4: Adjust the Hue/Saturation of the Clouds

Select Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Hue/Saturation and press Ctrl-G (Mac: Command-G) to create a clipping mask. Then, adjust the Hue, Saturation, and Lightness of the clouds as desired. For the example, I adjusted the Hue to -23, the Saturation to +79, and the Lightness to +9.

Step 5: Adjust the Hue/Saturation of the Image Overall

Select Layer>New Adjustment Layer>Hue/Saturation and adjust the Saturation of the overall image as desired. For the example, I felt the gray day had left my yellows a little too gray, so I adjusted the Yellow (via Yellow in the panel drop-down menu) to +37 (a fairly aggressive adjustment). This helped bring out the foliage on the mountain and the yellow stripe on the road. Then, I adjusted the overall image Saturation (via Master in the panel drop-down menu) to +8.