Hi. This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV.
I'm going to show you a quick and effective way to replace a burnt out sky in a photo.
This is an update of a tutorial I did on an earlier version of Photoshop.
Open a photo with a sky you'd like to replace.
If you'd like to use this one, I provided its link in my video's description or project files below.
The first step is to separate the sky from the rest of the photo.
There are many ways to do this, but for this example, I'll use the Quick Selection Tool.
If you're using this tool, as well, I generally find a radius of 5 to 15 pixels works fine.
Drag the tool over your landscape to select it.
To remove the selection over the sky, press and hold Alt on Windows or Option on a Mac
as you drag your tool over those areas.
To check your selection to make sure it included all of your landscape, press "Q" on your keyboard
to change the selection into a quick mask.
We'll refine the edges in a moment.
Press "Q" again to revert it back into a selection.
At the top, click the "Select and Mask " button if you're using version CC 2015.5 or later
or if you're using an earlier version, click the "Refine Edge" button.
You could also go to Select and click Select and Mask or Refine Edge in this list.
I did in-depth tutorials on Refine Edge and Select and Mask, so if you'd like to watch
them, I included their links, as well.
Click "Smart Radius" and drag the radius a bit to the right.
If you want to make your tool bigger or smaller, press the right or left bracket key on your keyboard.
Drag the tool over the edges of your landscape to refine their edges.
Check "Decontaminate Colors", which removes color fringe of the sky that may bleed into our landscape.
Output it to "New Layer with Layer Mask".
Then, click OK.
Make the background visible and make the top layer active.
Open your Gradient Tool.
Make sure the Linear Gradient icon is active and click the gradient bar to open the Gradient Editor.
Click the "Black, White" preset and click the lower, left Stop.
Click the color box and in the hexadecimal filed, type in 0151FE.
Then, click OK or press Enter or Return.
Click the lower, right Stop and the color box.
Type in A7CAFF.
Then, press Enter or Return twice to close both Windows.
Place your cursor a little above halfway up the sky and press and hold Shift as you drag
the Gradient Tool a little above the horizon.
Then, release.
You’ll notice that the gradient colors are inside your landscape instead of behind it,
so we need to invert the layer mask.
To do this, make the layer mask active and press Ctrl or Cmd + I.
Make a copy of the top layer and its Layer mask by pressing Ctrl or Cmd + J. Click off the chain-link to unlink
the layer and the layer mask.
Doing this, allows us to resize and reposition either of them independently of the other.
If your foreground and background colors aren't black and white, respectively, press "D" on your keyboard.
Go to Filter, Render and Clouds.
Change its Blend Mode to "Screen".
Zoom out of your image by pressing Ctrl or Cmd and the minus key on your keyboard a few times.
Go to Edit, Transform and Perspective.
Go to a top corner and drag the Transform Tool out approximately this much.
To accept it, click the check-mark at the top.
To fit your image back onto your canvas, press Ctrl or Cmd + 0.
The clouds actually extend beyond the visible area of our canvas, so we need to crop them off.
To do this, press Ctrl or Cmd + A to select the visible area of our document and go to Image and Crop.
To deselect it, press Ctrl or Cmd + D. Open your Transform Tool and go to the bottom of
the Transform's bounding box.
When you see a vertical, double-arrow, drag it up to the bottom of the sky.
Then, press Enter or Return.
Lastly, we're going to make our clouds a little less feathery and the blue sky a bit more vibrant.
Double-click the thumbnail of the clouds to open its Layer Style window.
The "Blend if" feature essentially clips one layer into another
based on the tones of the active layer and the layer below it.
The slider of "This Layer" is always linked to the active layer.
In this case, our active layer is the clouds layer.
Our gradient color is the "Underlying Layer".
Place your cursor directly on the icon on the slider of “This Layer”
and Alt-click or Option-click it.
This splits the icon in two.
By dragging the right half of the icon to the right, it feathers out the clouds over
the darkest areas of the gradient color, thereby revealing more of the color and less of the
clouds in those areas.
This is Marty from Blue Lightning TV. Thanks for watching!