From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Selecting and replacing skies - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Selecting and replacing skies

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- [Presenter] I'm sure that everyone at one point has found themselves in a beautiful location, but the sky just isn't as grand as the landscape in the foreground. Let's see how Photoshop can help us to not only select skies, but also replace them. If I just want to select the sky area, I can choose select, and then select Sky. This can be great if you want to do something like change the color or the tone in the sky with an adjustment layer. It's also a great way if you want to select the foreground, because then we could just click on the invert button. Now all the foreground is selected and we could make changes to that. I'll go ahead and deselect for now though, because I actually want to replace the sky. I'll choose the edit menu and then sky replacement. There are a number of default skies that ship with Photoshop. We can use the downward pointing Chevron in order to view the blue skies. I'll just make this a little larger and we can click through them and Photoshop will replace the sky in our image. In addition, there are some spectacular skies, so we could add a rainbow or maybe a sunset. And you'll notice as I select these different skies, not only is it replacing the sky, it's also changing the color balance in the foreground area. Alright, we also have some sunsets here that we could choose from. If we want to though, we can also use our own files. I'll use the gear icon and choose, get more skies, and then import images. I'll navigate to the 10 selections folder and select Sky 01, 02, and 03 and choose open because this folder was open, Photoshop added it to that folder, but we can create a new group. I'll call this JK and then we can drag those three images into that folder. And if I want to unnests it, I just need to drag it to the left here and let's put it at the top of the stack. So here, we have three different skies that we can choose from. One of the things that you want to make sure that you're looking at when you're replacing the sky is if the quality of light and the direction of light is the same in the sky that you're replacing as it is in the image. If it's not, you can use the flip button in order to flip the sky. So out of these three skies, I think I like this one the best. It's a little bit more dramatic than the other two. So let's select that. If I wanted to scale it, I could make it larger or smaller, and I can also position my cursor in the image area and drag it in order to reposition it. If you see fringing around the edge of your image, you can use the shift edge slider to either reduce or increase the softness of the edge to reduce that fringing. We can use the fade edge slider. It's going to affect the sky blending near the foreground. And if you move it over to the right, you're going to get a softer blending effect. If you move it over to the left, it's going to provide a crisper blending and it can reduce some halo effects that sometimes you'll see between the sky and say the mountains here. Then we have these sky adjustments, so we can change the brightness. We can either lighten or darken the sky and we can change the temperature, making it warmer or cooler. In this case, because these clouds here in the original image are quite cool, I think I'll decrease the temperature a bit. Below that, we have our foreground adjustments. There are two different lighting modes. Multiply will darken and screen will lighten. In this case, I prefer multiply. Then the next three sliders all affect the foreground elements so we can decrease or increase the foreground lighting. We can also change the edge lighting, and we can change the color in the foreground. So if I move it to the left, it's getting a little bit warmer. If I move it to the right, we're losing that warmth in the image. If you need to manually override some of these areas, you can use the brush right here and actually paint in the image to either show or hide the sky. When you're finished, we'll want to output this. I'm going to output it to new layers, and that way in the layers panel, I'll get an entire layer group with all of the different adjustments. Here, we have the sky with the sky mask. We've got the adjustments that were made to that sky, and of course, we can always go back in. And when I select the icon for the adjustment layer, we could go in and make additional changes to the brightness and contrast or to the color balance of the image. Below there, we have the edge lighting group that contains all of the masks and adjustments that we made along the edge. And then at the very bottom here, we have our foreground lighting. So all of this is reeditable at any time. And if you decide that you don't want this, you could simply delete the sky replacement group. So the next time you're out taking photographs, be sure to capture the foreground, even if the sky may seem a bit drab and when you see a fantastic sky, but the foreground elements aren't quite right, be sure to take the photo of the sky because Photoshop makes it easy to combine them.

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