I thought I’d bring you back to Moab today with this shot of Delicate Arch. I’ve been sitting on it for a while. I liked the composition and the fact that I and managed to frame it without including any of the hundred or so tourists who made the almost 2 mile hike to witness the sunset in the frame. But I struggled was with the bland sky — something I couldn’t control.

When I’m not happy with the sky I’ll often convert the image to Black and White. The other options are to mask in a sky from another image (as Jimmy McIntyre does so well) or use textures to bring the image to a more illustrative state. That’s what I chose to do here.

I used onOne Software Perfect Photo Suite 7.5 Textures module and applied two separate textures to the base image. I adjusted the opacity of each texture to my personal preferences.

For reference, here is the image before applying textures: