Old Wheel

Here is an example of what you can do to fix a blown out sky. On the day I shot this the sky was overcast and gray (not to interesting). I couldn't sit around waiting for the clouds to break up so I composed the image and planned to spruce it up in post. If the sky did look like this when I took the picture I would have used a graduated filter (or 2) to get the same effect.

To get the final image I brought the original photo into Photoshop, cut out the sky and brought in the sky from another photo. Once the photos were layered on top of each other I used a digital graduated filter to get the effect I was looking for

The way I look at is if you know what you would have needed to do in the field to get this shot if/when it presented itself then you can create what you saw in your mind when it doesn't. Does that make sense?

Here are the images I used

here are the layers involved