Saving a bad weather situation with Photoshop

For one of the lifestyle shooting days in Miami we rented a sailboat and went out early in the morning with two models, hoping to beat the bad weather that was predicted for later in the day. The day deteriorated sooner than we expected and the sun was dipping in and out of large cloud cover as a storm approached us off in the distance. Not much else to do by shoot fast and hope to deal with it later in Photoshop. In the days of film this would have been a disaster, but in the digital age it is business as usual. A sketchy weather prediction fifteen years ago would have led me to cancel the shoot instead of taking a chance.

The original image is on the left. It has been considerably brightened up with a warm tone added in post-processing. On the right is a photo I took on a cruise a few years ago. After stripping the background out of the photo on the left I added the sea background after making it out-of-focus with the lens blur in Photoshop. I also brightened the sun flare and warmed it up. The foreground shadows were added to complete the package. Phew. Saved by Photoshop. 

This photo was handled in a similar way, except by this time we were headed back and the rain was coming down hard. I was shooting with the Nikon D750 and the new Nikon 20mm f/1.8 lens. I used the pop-up flash to fill in the dark shadows on the models faces.