I am often asked how I achieve blue skies in my landscape shots. The presumption being that I use a UV filter, which is not a case. Matavit is achieved in post-production for the simple reason that it can be undone if things don't work out, or I change my mind six months later, which of course I am prone to do. Anyway, different jobs might require different colour interpretations before supplying the final JPEG copy. Whilst many settings made in camera are mandatory, I do not allow my hands to be tied by making adjustments that can be done equally well in post-production. Not being the case, you must save to raw first, and be prepared to use a dedicated software programme that will adjust images without decreasing their quality, such as Adobe, I-Trump. Nevertheless, how I take the photograph is equally important, which I execute with post-production in mind, resulting in an image out of camera that you might end up deleting. My working method is to underexpose by one third of a stop. In other words, expose to the left, not right, why? It's the image has a high dynamic range, and you are not going down the HDR road. You will end up with blown out highlights that are difficult to correct in post-production, if not impossible, and that can be as unassuming as cumulose clouds or sunlit water. If I now show the post-production copy, suddenly the whole image comes to life. Check the controls. I have taken highlights and whites right down to intensify the sky, and in some cases increase the blue luminance control. This can leave a dark image that I create with shadow and black sliders, or by increasing exposure just a tad, which can introduce another enemy noise. So I am trapped between balancing noise with overexposure, but noise is easier to correct. How much use suppress noise will depend on, dare I say, the quality of your camera, its age, exposure time and ISO setting, which I keep at 200, the optimum for most cameras. There is no point in mucking about what this of the light is strong. Some cameras are better at suppressing noise than others, and Micro 4 Thirds does not always come out well here, which makes my post-production techniques all the more important. Sometimes I resort to the noise reduction slider. Therefore, the burning question is, which settings do I use in post-production? The answer is experience. Every image requires its own treatment, and that I cannot teach. As my piano forte music teacher said, direct practice makes perfect, and I failed. The same applies to photography. So this technique works well with dramatic skies. With Adobe Lightroom, changes made to raw files are saved as separate linked sidecar files with the suffix xmp. Delete it, and you revert back to the original picture. If your program overrides the original image, look for something else, otherwise it changes the whole point of using raw, which I keep for later use, as well as saving my master please to JPEG for a client.