How To: Moody Clouds

A couple of people have asked how I got this moody image.
To be honest, it's a lot of trial and error, but these steps might help you get there faster if you're looking to make something similar.

Here's the starting canvas as it appears from the camera.I was trying to get a wide shot of a great blue heron in there that you can't really see.

The biggest step in getting moody clouds is a curves adjustment layer set to Linear Burn. As you can see, with the mask turned off the tree line is really dark, so I masked out selected parts using gradient fill - both linear and radial gradients. These give me smoother results than doing it by hand with a brush, but I'm too picky.

Next up, a Gradient Map layer to tint the scene. You can get some great sky color gradients from Adobe's exchange site. A gradient map just reasigns your image's lights and darks to colors along the color grade. I like to use these to get that slight unnatural color look. In this case I masked it out to just the tree area since I liked the clouds better as they were.

The other curves layer was just an auto-adjustment to pull out the blacks and a Hue layer to punch up the saturation just a little.

Here's the final image.

Of course, in making this it wasn't such a linear process. I'd add a curve layer and step through all the blending modes (multiply, overlay, etc) until something cought my eye. Then I'd try something else like the gradient map. Then went back and masked out parts of the curve layer to pop out parts of the treeline. All trial and error.

Just play around until you get something you like.