Note: for this article we will assume that you have shot in RAW format and will be using Adobe Photoshop CS4. There are a number of keyboard shortcuts you can use but I will not refer to these as they differ slightly depending on whether you use a PC or Mac.
Example:
Take one well exposed shot which has a fair amount of sky in it and a well defined horizon. (I have chosen a picture of a VW van):
This will form the base layer of our final image and as such should look the way you want it to so be sure to amend your settings accordingly.
When you select the image (RAW file) you want to open, Adobe Photoshop CS4 will open a preview pane in Camera Raw as below:
Working in this frame you can choose to amend your image to look the way you want. At this time you can ignore the sky to a certain extent as this will be sorted later on. Concentrate on getting a nice bright subject area.
As you can see, you can choose to amend the colour temperature, tint, exposure, recovery, fill light, blacks, brightness, contrast, clarity, vibrance and saturation. At this point you might want to take a few minutes to fiddle with each of the sliders to see what each one does.
Once you have chosen the settings for the main part of your image click Open Image and your image will open in a new Photoshop window.
The sky:
Our next step is to make the sky more moody. Understanding exposures you should already know that a sky being brighter will require a shorter exposure. Therefore to make our sky darker we will need to underexpose our image.
Go to File>Open and choose the same file as before.
Again the Camera Raw window will open.
This time we will amend our settings to make our sky look more atmospheric. In my image I have amended my exposure to -0.4 and kept all other vales the same.
The result is a dark, moody looking sky.
Click Open Image and this second image will again open in a new Photoshop Window.
You should now have two distinct versions of the same photo as below:
Go to version 2 of your image then click Select > All followed by Edit > Copy
Now go to version 1 of your image and click Edit > Paste.
This will paste the whole of the second image over the first so you will have an image that looks like the second but which actually consists of two layers as shown on the right hand side of your screen.
The next step is to create a mask over the layer which contains your darker exposure. To do this go to the layers window and ensure you have the correct layer selected. Now click the Add Layer Mask button.
You will see that your layer will now show a link to your mask (represented as a white rectangle). Making sure that the white rectangle is selected (represented by the outer corners as below) our next step is to create a gradient fill.
On your toolbar select Gradient Tool, ensure that your foreground is set as black and your background as white then in your Gradient dropdown menu at the top of the screen select the Foreground to Transparent option.
Our next job is to create the gradient mask.
Put your cursor over the image and click and drag a vertical line from your foreground into your sky. Here, the shorter the line, the harder your gradient will be and the longer the line the softer your gradient will be. As a general rule, you should start your line a little amount below your horizon and drag it to about half way up your sky. (The white line shows the an example of where to put your line)
The result can be altered by either undoing your previous action and dragging your line again or by super-imposing another gradient over the first. Have a play until you get the desired result and try lowering the opacity of the upper layer to give more of a "pop" from the lower layer.
There you have it- a simple but effective atmospheric sky.
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