Overexposed sky...best way to deal with it?

[geert99]

I have been shooting a lot of images at an airshow, but that day the weather was not great. The sky was a light/dark gray all day. This meant that I had to overexpose to get the aircraft exposed properly. This causes the skies to be very bright to the point of annoying.

I mainly use LR and I have some settings I do that get the sky darkened again, but this takes me a lot of time. I use masking in combination with dehaze and add shadows to get the aircraft exposure right again. I have noted that with enough 'dehaze' function, I can even get back all the structures in the clouds etc. So, to me, this means the information is there and the image is not blown out. The biggest issue is that it takes way to much time at each image.

Is there an easier way to do this? I also have PS because of the cc membership, but I'm not experienced with it (yet). I have looked somewhat into adjustment layers, but can't get it to work for me yet.

So, to summarize:
I have aircraft photos, with the aircraft exposed properly, but a sky that is way too bright. How do I correct this in an easy way?

[Arjenp]

So, to summarize:
I have aircraft photos, with the aircraft exposed properly, but a sky that is way too bright. How do I correct this in an easy way?

Are they RAW or in JPG format? Suggestion: upload an example somewhere to download so we can see what it is like and have a go at it

[geert99]

Are they RAW or in JPG format? Suggestion: upload an example somewhere to download so we can see what it is like and have a go at it

They are all in RAW format (luckily). I will look into how to upload one somewhere.

[Erik_7Xi]

Just convert into a JPEG without too much compression (or any if you can help it) and upload it somewhere like postimage.org and post a direct link so that we can download it.
(I'm not sure if postimage.org allows/supports RAW files and those of us on older LR versions may not be able to read that RAW file anyway - in particular if you're using a very recent camera model.)

The end result should be that you learn from what people here have done to get the most of your image and apply that yourself, so it doesn't matter if we have to do destructive modifications of a JPEG image anyway.

[bvdboomen]

Shooting in challenging conditions (bright skies, dark aircraft) takes more time to process afterwards. That's a given.

What I do is overexpose bij 1/3 to 1 1/3 (depends on brightness) and then bring the highlights back with the highlight function in Camera RAW. I suppose LR has a similar function. If you have a camera with a high dynamic range, you can expose by 0ev and lift the shadows since the sensor can deal with dark shadows. Be careful not to make them HDR alike.

Uploading a JPEG for us to look at is not a great idea. JPEG only has 8 bits per channel to work with compared to a 12/14 bit RAW file. That's way too small to correct lightning corrections on such a scale.