Hello, I'm Helen Bradley, welcome to this Photoshop video on replacing blown out
sky in Photoshop.
I have an image here that has no detail in the sky at all.
If I click the eyedropper tool
with the info palette visible and hold my mouse over the sky you can see that the
RGB values are 255, 255, 255.
There's nothing here.
If I go to print this image I'm not going to be printing in this area
so I'm going to have an area of white paper.
It's not going to look particularly attractive.
But the issue I'm facing right now is that this image is not worthy of a lot
of work. It's not a particularly exciting image. It's a fairly casual snapshot.
But when I print it I want it to look just a little bit better than it does at the
moment
but I don't want to spend hours of work fixing it up.
I want a simple replacement sky solution.
If you've ever tried to change the color of an element in an image you may know
that you can add a new layer to the image,
select color blend mode as the blend mode for that layer
and then select some paint. I've got some blue paint here
and a paintbrush and you can just paint over the area of the image that you want to
recolor.
Now on the face of it that would work really well if I was trying to recolor
something that actually had color in the first place.
The problem is with this image is that there's no color in the very area
that I want to apply color to.
So while I'm happily painting over the image in blue it's going into the
trees and the buildings and not where I want it to in the sky.
The solution to this is to take the image to LAB color mode.
If you've never been to LAB color mode before you don't need to worry too
much because it's not
very scary and we're not going to do much when we get there.
We're just going to make use of a property of LAB color mode.
So I'm going to choose Image and then Mode and then and then LAB color.
Anytime that you take an image into LAB color
that has more than one layer you're going to see this dialog.
We want these two layers when we arrive in LAB so we're going to select
don't flatten.
Now you can see this unique property of LAB color.
LAB color allows us to create a color that this is as white as white
but also has some blue coloring in it.
It's recolored the sky for us.
But we need to fix this before we go back to RGB because if we just
head back to RGB
as soon as we arrive there the color is going to disappear from the sky.
The fix is to create a duplicate of the background layer
and then blend this color layer
into the duplicate layer.
We do that by selecting the top layer and pressing Ctrl or Command E.
Now I have a regular image layer that has the blue sky in it.
The fact that it has blue trees as well is immaterial because we're going to fix
that when we arrive back in RGB color.
We've finished in LAB so let's head back to RGB,
Image Mode
and then RGB color.
Again we want these two layers separate when we get back to RGB so don't flatten.
So now we have a partial solution. The sky is blue. The problem is that other
pieces of the image are blue too.
And we solve this by using what are called Blend If sliders.
With the top layer select I'm going to select the Add Layer Style button here and
let's choose blending options.
At the foot of the layer style dialogue are these Blend If sliders and they allow us
to control how the two layers blend together.
And what I want to see is everywhere the underlying layer has color in it
I want to see that color.
So I want to blend in where the underlying layer has color. I want to see through this top
layer.
And you can see as I drag on this slider the further I go across the blue
color is being removed from the trees and the buildings but it's staying where I
want it to be which is in the sky.
When I get it to a position that looks good to me I'm going to split the slider.
I do this by holding the Alt or Option key on the Mac and just dragging the slider
into two pieces.
This gives a more gradual transition for the blending of the two layers
and then just click Ok to finish.
So there's a quick and easy solution for replacing a sky in Photoshop.
I'm Helen Bradley, thank you for joining me for this video tutorial.
If you're looking for more of my work you can find my website at
projectwoman.com
I blog on post-production at digitalphotographyschool.com. I produce
Photoshop and Lightroom video training for designers at mediabistro.com.
And some of my tutorials are featured on Adobe's own support site for Photoshop
Lightroom.