Welcome back to another very exciting tutorial here at the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com.
My name is Jesus Ramirez and you can find me on Twitter @JRfromPTC.
In this video, I'm going to show you sky replacements in Photoshop. This tutorial is actually part
of my Amazon.com collection. I was recently invited to post video tutorials to Amazon
video shorts, which is part of the Amazon instant video platform. All of my tutorials
there are free, and they're either completely new or shorter versions of some of the tutorials
that you have seen on this YouTube channel. If you want to see the rest of my Amazon video
shorts, go to ptcvids.com/amazon or look at the description below for the link. And don't
worry; I'll still keep updating this YouTube channel, just as before. Nothing will change
here.
And talking about YouTube, I would just like to take this opportunity to thank you. I just
received a plaque from YouTube for reaching 100,000 subscribers. Thank you, again, for
all your support. I, really, do appreciate it. But anyway, back to the tutorial.
As I already mentioned, in this video, I'm going to show you how to do sky replacements
in Photoshop. First, we have our original image, and what we want to do is we want to
replace the sky.
First step is to find a different image with a sky that you like, but you have to make
sure that the perspective matches. What I mean by that is that when you select an image,
for example, this one here, this one wouldn't work, because this image was taken with the
camera pointing straight up at the clouds, so the perspective is not going to match the
image of this street we're working with. As you can see there, once I've added the cloud
into this composition, it just doesn't work because you don't have the right perspective
and, also, the scale is off.
So we have to find an image, whose perspective matches our original image, and that we can
scale appropriately. This image here has some nice clouds. We see the horizon line here
at the bottom, which is going to be important in placing the clouds on this image. You can
see the horizon line here. So what we can do is use this image here and you don't need
to be exact and match the horizon lines. You can be off a little bit, but as long as they're
very similar horizon lines, you shouldn't have a problem with perspective. So I'm going
to place these clouds here.
There's a lot of ways in which you can mask in Photoshop. Sometimes, you don't even have
to mask at all. You can use something called the "Blend If" sliders to create the mask,
in order to combine two images together. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to enable
this layer, Clouds 1, and double click to the right of that layer to bring up the Layer
Style window. From here, I can play around with the Blend If sliders to blend these two
layers together.
The Blend If sliders allow us to hide parts of the current layer to reveal parts of the
bottom layer by using these sliders that you see here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going
to go into Blend If and choose blue, and then I'm going to click on this slider and drag
that to the right, and you'll notice that the image will start appearing but the sky
remains intact. One of the downsides is that by using the slider, the transitions are very
hard, but what you can do is you can hold Alt; Option on the Mac, click on the slider,
it splits it in two, and you can separate that slider to make this smoother transition.
If you go too far, the clouds will start disappearing, so you got to find the balance between the
foreground and background. As you can see here, we're having some issues here, but that's
okay. We're going to deal with those in a moment. I'm going to press OK and you can
see that the clouds are looking pretty good, and, now, we're going to use a mask to hide
the elements that are spilling over on to the building and the street and the cars.
So I'm going to click on this icon here to create a Layer Mask. With Layer Mask, you
can paint with black to hide pixels or paint with white to reveal them. I'm going to Undo
those brush strokes to start with a clean mask, meaning, the mask is completely white,
then I can paint with black in areas here on the building, that are showing some of
that blue. One thing you can do is click on a polygonal Lasso Tool and just make a very
rough selection around the areas that you do not want that background to show through.
I'm just, quickly, making the selection, then I can fill it with black. Black is my foreground
color, so I can press Alt and Backspace; Option and Backspace on the Mac. If I come over into
the Layer Mask icon, I can hold Alt and you will see what my mask looks like. Everything
in black is hidden and everything in white is being shown.
I'm going to hold Alt again and click on the Layer Mask icon to bring it back. So now we
have the before sky and the after. Here's a little bit of the original mountains coming
through from the clouds layer that I'm not liking, so I can click on my brush again,
make sure that I have a brush with the hardness set to zero, which is a soft brush. Then I
can make the brush bigger by clicking on the Right Bracket key in the keyboard and just
painting with black to hide those pixels. So, now, we only have the clouds in our image.
And that's it for this tutorial. I hope that you enjoyed it and that you learned something
new. Don't forget to check out the rest of my Amazon video shorts at ptcvids.com/amazon.
Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you again, soon.