I'm going to show you how to change a sky in a photo in just five easy steps
hey I'm Tim from Tim's photos.com I'm a landscape photographer and I've got a
question for you what's the difference between studio photographers and
landscape photographers well studio photographers bring their
lights with them and they control the lighting but landscape photographers
have to rely upon whatever the lighting is on that particular day which means
that we can't stay out in the field in the mountains for 365 consecutive days
waiting for the perfect sky and that means every now and then we need to
change the sky in Photoshop and I'm going to show you how to do that in five
quick easy steps so I've got this open in Photoshop and this is a panorama I
think it's about six images stitched into one so it's a very large image
something like twelve thousand pixels wide and I love the image but I hate the
sky it's the most blah sky and I don't like it so let's change this sky we're
going to do this in five steps here's step one of five choose the layer that
is going to be on top the layer that we're going to keep and let's use the
select and mask command up in the top right I want to go to marching ants
select the very top brush in the top left which is called the quick selection
tool and I am going to select the area that I want to keep
and I'm click left clicking and holding down and I'm still holding still holding
and remember this is the area I want to keep and I'm going to make sure that I
select the whole thing so this is now our rough selection step two out of five
is to refine the mask I'm going to click the refine edge brush tool and I'm going
to zoom in to 100 now let's pan across and I do this by
holding down the spacebar and dragging with the little hand I'm still holding
the spacebar okay letting go I'm going to increase the size of my brush by
hitting the right bracket left click along that edge and let go and then let
Photoshop do its work let's do it again
let go let photo Photoshop calculate I'm going to scroll hold down the spacebar
once again left click and drag along this edge I'm going to go right to the
edge of the building and then let Photoshop calculate here I've let go now
and it's looking pretty good you can see that it's accommodated for these holes
up here which is perfect going to refine this edge let's see how Photoshop does
on this looking good along this edge now in this case I
didn't like that so I'm going to hit ctrl Z ctrl Z and
that'll save me a little bit of work later now continuing with refining the
edge there are a couple of things up in here that need to be tweaked also this
guy is not showing through this is looking good but I've got some areas
right here that need to be eliminated so I click the third brush down and I just
have to brush over those areas that I absolutely know I want to keep a little
mistake there ctrl Z and redo this this is
fantastic a couple other little holes in the roof line that Photoshop put there
thinking that it was so bright that it was a sky just eliminating those with
the brush tool now I'm going to zoom in to 200% and try and fix these holes now
in the top right click the view drop down go to overlay and it's going to
show everything in red that is going to be revealed and I'm going to zoom in to
100% and take a look for things that are red here this is a bit of a problem
so let's take that brush make the brush bigger by hitting the right bracket and
brush over that now we need to make adjustments on the global refinement
sliders I'm not going to touch the smooth but I am going to move the
feather to one pixel and I'm going to pay close attention to the edges of
these branches here because I want them to have somewhat of a sharp edge zoom in
to 200% take a good look at these edges because
as it is now you can see that the red is infiltrating into the bushes and the
trees and that means that once we render this thing out it's going to have a
white color tone to the edges that have a bit of red in them so let's enhance
the contrast up to 20% and see if it makes a difference I always just make
the adjustment and then wait and see the difference and already that red has
disappeared for the most part out of the edges I can still see some here let's
bump the contrast up to 30% and then wait watch and there's our improvement
I'm going to enhance the they're up to four pixels and just see
what it does make the adjustment wait let your computer process and I don't
like it it introduced a bunch of white so I'll pull that back down to one pixel
where it was in the first place and there's the adjustment I'm going to
call this done click okay fit on screen we're ready for step three which is to
bring in the new background layer open up the file for the new background layer
this is a raw image so it's going to open up the raw editor I'm fairly happy
with the way that it looks now but I'm going to drop the highlights a bit and
open up the shadows I'm not trying for any sort of a wild look I could easily
crank up the vibrance on this and it's an amazing looking sky but I don't think
that it's going to be consistent with the setting that I have here on the
ground because we just don't have those color tones that are reflected on the
ground step 4 of 5 is to import the new sky into our existing image click select
all edit copy open the original tab where our work is edit paste now we need
to resize the image ctrl T for the transform command click this little link
button at the top so that the aspect ratio won't change when I drag the
corners pull the right side to the edge pull the left side to the left edge
hit enter to accept the transformation pull the new layer down to the bottom
click the move tool and move the new sky to any height that I want it to be this
doesn't look real to me this does step 5 the last and final step is to adjust any
color imbalances this particular image was quite problematic because I took the
photo when there was still some Sun hitting the ground this entire left side
of the mountain had Sun on it the right side was in the shade and there was also
Sun hitting across the tops of the lavender here so I spent a considerable
amount of time using the burn tool set at 9% exposure and making adjustments to
mid-tones as well as highlights and I darkened this left side of the mountain
I also darkened the tops of the lavender where the Sun was hitting it and the
reason for this is because it didn't look right it was obvious that there was
sun shining from camera right over onto the left side of the frame and it didn't
match up with what I was seeing in the clouds so I made it appear as if the
image was shot during a sunset time and the this would be consistent with the
type of sunset look that's occurring up there in the clouds so that's it in five
steps I'm happy with the image now it's as I said it's twelve thousand pixels
wide so this could be printed very large let's take a look at the edge at 100%
and just see how the cropping looks this looks flawless this is perfect
very good very nice looking up along the top
no problems there at all so let's look at the before
and here's the after and we just transformed this image to something that
I think looks very nice and that is how you change a sky in five easy steps and
in case you were wondering the image that I used for this tutorial is from
the south of France in Provence at the cenang Abbey which was founded in the
year 11:48 it's an amazing place so if you
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