There have been many topics and posts addressing sky replacements in photographs. I do not want to regurgitate old arguments regarding the legitimacy and ethical correctness of doing that. Neither do I want to revive the debates about the validity of photo manipulation in general. I'm looking for a different perspective.

Many if not most photos with sky replacements posted here just don't look that good to me. I question the value added, the commonly accepted premise that a photo with a "boring" sky will be made much better with a different sky. And the result is too often an image with overly dramatic clouds that compete with and take away from the main subject. I know that people like dramatic skies and that these types of images sell better. But why?

Does anyone out there agree with me, or am I just out of synch with the rest of the world?

One of my mentors, Dewitt Jones, who shot for many years for the National Geographic, gave me great insight on your question. Start here...the minute you put a filter on the front of your lens, you've already manipulated the image. In fact, you've also manipulated your image just by the way you compose the frame. Next...how difficult is it to learn Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom well? You could argue that it's just as hard as learning how to be a good photographer. It's a skill. When we use Photoshop, we are using our skills, just like when we are taking the image itself. Yes, our photography is art. In fact, (my opinion, not necessarily Dewitt's), if our photography is not art, why bother? We all love photography because we can capture beautiful images...which can be enhanced if we know what we are doing. Dewitt has always taken the position that there is nothing wrong with photo manipulation...as long as we are willing to tell the viewer of our work that the image was manipulated in Ps or Lr. I took a beautiful image of a Lighthouse on the Oregon coast a few years ago, and as beautiful as the scene was, the image was diminished in beauty because of the parking lot, which was an eyesore. I removed the parking lot from the image. I've never hid that fact from the viewers of that frame. (In fact, some have been more impressed with the fact I knew how to do that versus shooting the image itself.) I take this position: This is my work, and I can do anything I want. It's my art. I've got enough "rules" that control the rest of my life. I want to escape INTO my photography...not walk into a whole new set of rules. My recommendation? Do whatever you like and don't apologize to yourself or anyone else.

Hi, I actually responded to a similar post from yesterday - short answer, if you are a photojournalist then you should definitely not use this feature and in general should do little to no post processing. For anyone else, photography is an art medium and the goal is interesting and impressive imagery.

As a portrait photographer in the LA area, we often have blue skies as far as the eye can see with not a cloud in sight, and this makes for some boring images. I have used sky replacement in these cases and have turned nice shots into amazing images just because the sky portion wasn't just a monotone blue devoid of interest. My clients loved it, and they were there so they knew that the sky had been replaced (not to mention I told them so). As such, I would say it was a success.

As an artist, it is just another brush. You should be confident enough in your photography not to be worried that amateurs are going to challenge you because they can do things like this in post production. There are some things that software cannot do and likely never will very well - like light a scene correctly, or composing a great shot. Nobody is going to just replace a sky in some poor image and win and award. Just my thoughts on the matter :)