I first learned about the effectiveness of darkening a sky from studying the work of Ansel Adams. Many of his black and white images featured a black sky, and that added visual impact to many of his famous landscapes. While this picture of polar bears (a mother and two almost-adult cubs) on the shore of Hudson Bay in Canada doesn't have a black sky, I did darken it to help focus our attention on the bears. I do this most of the time in Adobe Camera Raw (Lightroom has the same tool) with the graduated filter. It's like pull down a window shade from the top of the frame. With sliders on the right side of the dialog box, you can contol the density, color, contrast, clarity, etc. of the affected area.
My settings for this picture were: 1/640th, f/5, 1000 ISO (because it was quite dark), and I used a 70-200mm f/2.8 Canon zoom set to 200mm.
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