(upbeat electronic music)
- [Chris] Hello, friends.
This is Chris Orwig and welcome to another tutorial.
In this tutorial, I wanna show you
how you can change the sky in a photograph.
Here in the portrait on the left,
you can see that the sky was completely white,
yet the day before I captured this image
with some nice clouds, blue sky.
I wanna use this sky in this photograph.
How do we do that?
Well, the first thing we do as you can see here,
is arrange the photograph,
so I went to Arrange, I have 2-Up Vertical,
so they're side by side.
Grab the Move Tool and I'll click into the image
with the sky and then just click, drag, and drop.
Next press F to go to full-screen mode.
So here we can see we have the sky above the background.
I want to reverse that, so unlock the background layer.
I'll go ahead and name this one Surfer
and double click to name the other layer sky.
Now to reorder layers, just click and drag.
That reorders the layers stack.
And before we get too carried away with advanced selections
and correcting the selections,
one of the ways that you can test things out,
especially if you have a lot of white in the sky like this,
is to do advanced blending.
You access that by double clicking the layer.
It opens up your blending options
and here you have the advanced blending.
If you go to this layer and take the whites down,
you can see how it removes the whites from the image.
Here I'll click OK.
Now the results aren't great,
but it's giving me a preview.
It's telling me, hey will this work?
Yeah, I think so.
I think that'll be cool.
We can click into the sky layer,
we can kinda reposition it
and say yeah, this is gonna be good.
The problem with this approach
is that it also punched holes anywhere else
where it was bright white.
The other sand, on the subject.
So I need to select the sky
and remove it in a more intelligent way, right?
The way that we do that is go back, double click the layer.
And then just bring the slider all the way back up.
Now, there are times where you can blend a sky together
with these sliders.
I just wanna point that while I'm here.
If you hold down the Option key on a Mac, Alt on Windows,
you can split these two,
and sometimes you can find a nice combination
where you get a good version of the sky
and it works in that way.
Or you bring this down to just the right spot
and do some other masking.
So, sometimes that will work, but not always.
So, just wanna highlight that.
All right.
Well let's go back to work.
For me, I'm just using this as a preview.
Is this a good idea?
I've decided, yes.
Next step.
Press the W key for Quick Select
and with the Quick Select Tool, what I wanna do,
is change my brush size, right bracket key,
And just click and drag over the sky.
Then zoom in and if there are any problem areas,
like right here,
I'll go ahead and make my brush size a little smaller,
and make sure that her arm is a part of the selection.
I'm just selecting the sky right now.
And I think for the most part,
we have a good selection here.
We just add a little bit more of the hair
into this part area,
and then will fix that up later
once we get to select and mask.
Okay, next step is to go to Select and Mask.
When we get there, we're gonna see that we have
the opposite of what we want selected,
but I wanna show you how we can fix that.
So go to Select and Mask.
Inside of this,
you wanna make sure you're viewing this On Layers.
And when we view this on layers,
we see that yeah, okay this is weird.
I have the bad sky plus the part of the image
I don't wanna have.
But if you scroll down, there's a button called Invert.
And that will fix the problem.
And so if ever you make that mistake,
just go to the bottom here in this menu, hit Invert
and that will fix the issue.
Okay, next we need to zoom in,
so let's zoom in on the image.
And we need to use our Refine Edge Tool.
And with this tool,
I'm gonna go ahead and just paint over these areas
to try to add more blending.
And this tool really is kinda magical
in the way that it helps us to work with areas
where we have a little bit of transparency
like we have here.
And you just wanna make sure your crosshairs
are painting on the area
that is the area that you wanna get rid of.
And then it looks like my shoulder disappeared over here,
so I'm gonna go ahead and paint that in a little bit too.
And then, use the minus icon.
I might need to paint this in when we get back out of here.
'Cause the shoulder, it's not that great of a line there.
But I'll fix that later.
Another thing to try when you're working
with this technique, is decontaminate colors.
Sometimes this can lead to better results,
sometimes worse.
But if we zoom in so you can see this here.
Zooming in passed 100% here,
you can kinda see how it helped
to kind of fix those edges a little bit.
Now, if you see more white areas,
just make sure you have that brush
and the plus icon for this one,
and make sure the plus is covering the white areas,
or whatever color it is in the background
that you're trying to get rid of.
And I'm just clicking a couple times over these areas
and this is helping me to get a little bit better results
on the hair.
And that really is crazy, amazing
what a good job it does with that.
Okay.
Well, now we have this.
Next thing I notice is that the subject looks good.
Horizon line doesn't.
So I'll show you how to fix that.
Here we click OK to go ahead and apply this,
and I'll just apply this as a New Layer with a Layer Mask.
Click OK.
This gives us our new layer right here.
Remember I said that we had this shoulder issue
we needed to fix,
so click into the mask, this one right here.
Grab Brush, and I'll go ahead and paint with white,
a small brush, no hardness.
100% Opacity.
And if I paint with white what it will do,
is it will add more of the shoulder.
Tap the X key.
That allows me to paint with black,
and then I'll paint away,
there's kind of a strange little edge there.
That one.
Now when it comes to edges, as I mentioned,
there's an issue where this horizon line edge,
it's a little bit too cut out.
How do we fix that because I wanna soften that,
but I wanna keep all of these edges as is.
So, what we're gonna do is make sure we click into the mask,
the little white brackets show us where we are.
So we click into the mask.
Grab the Lasso Tool,
and with the Lasso Tool, we're gonna make a selection
around all of this, so just go around here.
It can be pretty rough,
so just making my way around here.
And what we're gonna do is modify this part of the mask.
Not the image, so I'm on the mask right now.
And we're gonna modify it with two steps.
One is using a filter called Minimum.
Another one is with a filter Gaussian Blur.
So let me show you the first filter.
Filter, Other, and Minimum.
Also, I wanna point out, if ever you do this technique
and it does the opposite of what you want,
just try the other one.
But what minimum does,
is it minimizes our white area in our mask.
So if we take a look at this, as I increase this,
can you see how it's kind of chopping down
that part of the mask?
So what I'm gonna do is just take this in just a little bit,
and then blur it out.
So I take it in first, then I'll go to Filter, Blur,
and Gaussian Blur.
And then the softening effect is the one
which allows me to have, kind of a softer edge.
And I learned this from a friend who does compositing,
'cause it kinda blurs better
into the background in that way.
And then click OK.
And this works for all kinds of techniques
besides replacing skies,
but it's a perfect chance to illustrate it.
Let me show it to you one more time.
Click into the mask, grab the Lasso Tool.
With the Lasso Tool, make a rough selection.
Doesn't matter how precise or how big.
Just rough selection around the area that you wanna work on.
And then we go to Filter, Other, Minimum.
This just trims a little bit off of that.
And so we just need to trim just a hair off of that.
Click OK.
And when you trim it off,
it gives you the space to be able to then blur it back,
so that's why we have to do that.
Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur.
And then we can add the blur amount, creates a softer edge,
little less cardboard cut out look.
And with that, we have accomplished the task
of putting in a new sky.
And the great thing about this,
is the sky is on a separate layer here, right?
So we could use the Move Tool if we needed to reposition it,
or Free Transform it, or experiment with different ways
that we wanna use that.
Maybe something like that, is kinda cool.
All right, well from here of course,
we could make other adjustments, color and tone,
but for the sake of this tutorial,
we have accomplished the task
and I hope you've picked up some valuable tips
and techniques along the way,
and thanks so much for joining me in this tutorial.
I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day.
Bye for now.
(piano key ringing)