Bright and sunny day would be a nice time to shoot a beau­ti­ful sky, but if you are try­ing to expose a sub­ject under shades or with their backs to the sun, you will more often than not get blown out or lack of sky details due to the dynamic range of a typ­i­cal dig­i­tal camera.

You can use Adobe Pho­to­shop Light­room to enhance the sky with the sat­u­ra­tion slider, but your sat­u­ra­tion set­tings will inten­sify the col­ors glob­ally, and depend­ing on the sub­ject of the pho­to­graph, that might not be the best solu­tion. With sat­u­ra­tion, it is fairly easy to mrs with skin tones, and that is some­thing that you would not want to mess with.

A good alter­na­tive is to use the blue lumi­nance slider. It should pull some blues out of your image and as a result a more bolder and darker sky.

Before and after of the Lumi­nance Blue slider effect.

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As with any­thing in Light­room, you can make a pre­set out of it. My pre­set include 3 level of set­tings which you can use. As always, you can use the nav­i­ga­tor to pre­view before you apply the said preset.

To install,

1) Nav­i­gate to your Light­room pre­sets folder. The eas­i­est way to do this is to go to Lightroom’s pref­er­ences by click­ing the Light­room menu and choos­ing Pref­er­ences (PC: Edit > Pref­er­ences). Then choose the Pre­sets tab and click the “Show Light­room Pre­sets Folder” but­ton to open the Light­room Folder.

2) Now go into the Light­room Folder. Then go into the Develop Pre­set folder.

3) UNZIP the file you down­loaded from the bot­tom of this post.

4) Copy and paste the “.lrtem­plate” files into the Local Adjust­ment Pre­sets folder.

5) Restart Lightroom

Final image

You can down­load my Deep Blue Sky Light­room Pre­set here.