Editing the Sky

I’ve always loved photographing the beautiful sky; to me, it’s one of the most beautiful and perfect things in existence… Recently, I’ve taken photos on different days and saved them, on those days when I see it looking beautiful, with perfect clouds, and I decided to edit them. But honestly, whenever I edit them, I end up applying the same adjustments—it’s like a habit of always playing it safe. That’s why today I asked Gemini for help to give me different adjustments so I could edit my photos. I don’t know if they look better or not, but either way, I think they’re both beautiful photos.

The first photo I took was this one, where the sun was just rising one morning. Even though I hate the sun and the heat, I thought it was beautiful to see it peeking out from behind the mountain at dawn, with the clouds lit up and shaped so beautifully that it simply left me speechless. In this photo, according to Gemini, I wanted to highlight the warm tones of the sunrise and make the buildings and mountains a little more visible so the photo wouldn’t be so dark.

I didn't like the next one as much, but when I edited it, it looked completely different. Gemini helped me highlight every detail—even the parts that look ugly fit perfectly because it's a real photo, and everything real is imperfect. But the sky is still beautiful; it's still the star of the show.


For this photo, I asked Gemini to make an adjustment that would give it an “aesthetic” look. I actually loved the original photo because I took it indoors in fairly low light, with the sun rising brightly in the distance. I loved how the shape of the window stood out and the interplay of light and shadow. So, I’m not sure if I like this edited version as much—I think the original is better.


And finally, the hardest one: for this one, I asked Gemini to give me the settings to turn this photo into an “aesthetic” photo with a “BLUE HOUR” style. Basically, these are photos with blue lighting that evoke a lot of nostalgia; I personally love them—they make me feel strangely as if I’ve already been to those places. It was pretty hard to figure out the settings Gemini gave me for this image since the photo had a lot of orange tones that I had to neutralize without turning them completely blue. I also had to play around with the Curves tool until I got a result that looked pretty close to the blue hour. I don’t feel like it’s 100% true to the photos I’ve seen online, but for my first try, it turned out pretty great.



It's because of things like this that I sometimes feel AI is actually quite useful; despite everything, I got good results for a first try.