I notice many shots with the heavily burned skies - and I do like the technique generally (provided it's not OTT), but I think the key is to find a purpose for the mood it creates which is normally very austere, heavy and sometimes oppressive.
I'd use a combination of IR and Polarizing filters. align the polarizing filter to reduce intensity of the blue sky and it should be almost black. This is most effective when taking pictures perpendicular to the sun as that light is the most polarized.
I notice many shots with the heavily burned skies - and I do like the technique generally (provided it's not OTT), but I think the key is to find a purpose for the mood it creates which is normally very austere, heavy and sometimes oppressive.
I'd probably use a polariser to darken the original sky, then channel mixer, heavily favouring the blue channel and then a bit of burning.
If you start with a fairly light sky, it will certainly take a lot of adjustments to get something that black (which shows in the contrast) but a polariser can get you most of the way there in the first place.
For an example, this is essentially an untouched camera original:
It wouldn't be much work to have a black sky in this case.
Another example, again polarised but mostly unadjusted:
This is another one of those examples where shooting stuff in camera, with a particular post-processing in mind makes a lot of sense. You can in some cases easily 'over polarise' a sky for a normal view, but would be perfect for a B&W treatment.
The original at the top of this thread just looks rather heavily edited though. You can get something like that effect using the Hue/saturation adjustments on only the blue channel and dropping the lightness all the way down.
Well, unintentionally. I've been sitting around trying to reproduce the results legally and it's pretty clear that I dodged and burned (as many others have pointed out.) I remember editing the photo for a long time making sure to stay within the rules. I think what happened is that I burned when I was still in color which I rarely ever do so I lost track of where I was in the editing process.
Anyway, my photo will be gone soon....
As far as the effect, I believe the closest you can get would be to drop the blue and cyan down in hue/saturation and then to use the red channel.
I really wish I had better equipment. My photoshop editing usually changes my original quite drastically. People would be in shock if they saw the originals of most of my challenge images. In this case, an illegal technique has been used and I completely understand that it will be dealt with accordingly. I need to write basic or open on my hand during the week I guess. It's hard to remember when you're editing a lot of photos at a time and not specifically for the challenge. Sorry for the waste of time!
JonPink, I totally agree with your findings. There is no good way to replace the dodge and burn tool!
I really wish I had better equipment. My photoshop editing usually changes my original quite drastically. People would be in shock if they saw the originals of most of my challenge images. In this case, an illegal technique has been used and I completely understand that it will be dealt with accordingly. I need to write basic or open on my hand during the week I guess. It's hard to remember when you're editing a lot of photos at a time and not specifically for the challenge. Sorry for the waste of time!
JonPink, I totally agree with your findings. There is no good way to replace the dodge and burn tool!
Don't be so hard on yourself. These people came down on you like a ton of bricks (edit: actually only one person really). I enjoyed the image and I think the overtop burning you did on this image is the great work of a skilled eye.
Another example, again polarised but mostly unadjusted:
Using this as an example, I pulled it in to the channel mixer, and set the blue to about -20, red to about 120 and you get basically an inky black sky. You can pull that a little further by giving an 'S' shaped curve adjustment. And almost no noise...
