Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this video tutorial. In this tutorial I'm going
to show you how you can deal with fringing around trees and other elements in your photos
when you're replacing skies. Before we get started with this tutorial let's have a look
and see the problem that we're trying to solve here. This is an image that was sent to me
by a reader from my blog and what they wanted to do was to replace the sky in the original
image. So let's just have a look and see what they had. This was their original image and
it had a very pale sky. Now they tried to do it using Blend if and also to remove the
sky and replace it. The problem is that the results really aren't up to scratch because
there's a lot of fringing around the trees here and so they wrote and asked what they
could do about that. And this is my solution here and this is the solution I'm going to
show you how to achieve because here we've got the trees a lot more blended into the
sky and the result is a little bit better. So I'm going to show you how you can get to
this solution and avoid the problems with the fringing around the trees as you're seeing
here.
Now to see this process at work I've made a duplicate of the original image that I was
sent so I've got the sky on a layer and this is the original image. As always the first
thing I'm going to do is make a duplicate of the background layer, the main image layer,
so that I can work on it. Now one of the things I was a little concerned about in the fix
that I saw was that there is a lot of this black area, a really dark area of the sky
coming through the trees so the first thing that I did was to actually deal with this
sky layer a little bit better. So I'm just going to grab the Move tool here. I'm going
to Ctrl T, Ctrl 0 so I can see exactly what I'm working with. And you can see that we
have quite a bit of sky image that we can work with and I think it was just a bit on
the dark side. So I'm going to make it a little bit less dark and I'm going to also stretch
it out a little bit. Now I want to keep pretty much to the original proportions of the sky.
I don't want to stretch it out too much because it really is quite an interesting sky but
I do think I need a slightly lighter gray area behind the trees. So let's just select
that and call that good.
So I'm just going to zoom the image a bit better so that we can now get to work on it.
And I'm going to put this sky layer behind the image layer because we really want to
be seeing the image. Now the way that I solved this problem was to go to the Magic Wand tool.
Now this is not a tool that I generally recommend and it's often called the Tragic Wand tool
because it really isn't the world's most sophisticated tool but for this image it does a really good
job. So the first thing I'm going to do is make sure that Contiguous is not selected.
If Contiguous were selected then when I select an area here I'm only going to get the white
or blue sort of color here that is all adjacent and connected pixels. But I don't want it
because I want to pick up little bits here and here and here so Contiguous needs to be
turned off. Anti-alias will also try to feather the edges a little bit for me. So that's pretty
good. I have a 3 x 3 average sample size. That just means that we're going to sample
a 3 x 3 block of pixels rather than just a single pixel under the cursor because it's
really impossible to see what we're clicking on here. And I'm going to adjust my Tolerance.
Now I started with 25 when I did it but I'm thinking this second time around I might experiment
with 30, just a bit higher Tolerance. This means that when I click on the image now I'm
going to select the area under the cursor and everything else that is in that range
of colored pixels. So you can see that I'm picking up pixels through the trees here as
well as the sky. And that's pretty good. I think that's a pretty good start.
So now I'm going to mask this by clicking on the Add Layer Mask icon and that has given
me a mask totally the wrong way around but I'm just going to click on the mask to select
it and press Ctrl I to invert it. So, so far we've got the sky coming through the trees.
And the sky is probably a better one than we had in the first place. Let's just switch
to what was sent to me and you can see that the sky was probably a bit overly dark and
certainly too dark through the trees here for the image that we were working with. But
here we've got some lighter pixels in it so part of the solution is looking better. It's
just that the fringing has not gone away. So we need to deal now with this fringing
problem.
And the solution to the fringing problem is really dictated by what fringing is. If we
have a look in here at the fringing issue it's because the pixels around the very edge
of these leaves are very light because it was taken against a very light sky. So the
solution is to darken these edges and if we can darken the edges we'll get rid of the
fringing. So we're going to use the selection that we have of the sky in this mask here
as a way of extracting these edges to darken them up. So I'm going to click on the Layer
Mask thumbnail, in actual fact Ctrl click on it to select the area that we have selected
there. Let's go back to the image and I'm just going to press Delete so you can see
what was selected. What is selected is all the white area. So that's everything that
was in this image. So let's just undo that.
Now that we've got it selected what I want to do is to bring the selection in just a
little bit so I'm going to contract it. I'll choose Select and then Modify and then Contract
because I'm going to bring the selection in around 20 pixels. Now that has made these
pixels on the outside. So they're outside the selection. Again, let's just press the
Delete key so we can see what we're working with. What I've done is basically isolated
the problem areas to an area all by themselves so I can do something with them. It's just
that they're not selected right now. Let's press Ctrl Z to undo that. And I want to soften
this edge as well but first of all I'm going to invert it. So I'm going to choose Select,
Inverse. So now what is selected is all the problem area and what's unselected is the
bit that I don't want to affect. Let's go back to that. And now I just want to feather
it a little bit so I'm going to choose Select and then Modify. And I'll just use Feather
here and I'll feather it probably around 10 pixels just to soften those edges. So now
let's see what we've got. When I press Delete these are the areas that are not selected.
Everything else is selected. So all the problem areas right now are selected. I'm going to
press Ctrl Z to undo that.
So now that we've got a selection that covers the area that we're having problems with the
solution is to darken that area and we can do that with the Burn tool here. The Burn
tool shares a toolbar position with Dodge and Sponge but it's Burn that we want because
that's a darkening effect. And it uses a brush so what you want to do is go and get a nice
soft edge brush. So I'm going to select this brush which actually has a hard edge and I'm
just going to soften its edge probably to around 25 percent. Ok, and it's way too small
right now so I'm just going to increase its size by pressing the Square Bracket. But of
course I could adjust its size by adjusting the size here on the slider.
I want to affect the highlight. So I can affect with the Burn tool highlights, mid tones or
shadows. But it's the highlight areas of this image that are the problem so I'm going to
choose to affect highlights. And then I can adjust Exposure. Now Exposure ramps up pretty
quickly so you'll actually probably only want it to be around 20 percent or you're going
to attack this image way too fast. And because the area that I want to affect is the area
selected I'm just going to paint over it. Now if I press Ctrl or Command H I can actually
hide these selections so that we can't see the selection. All we can see is the problem
and that's even better because now I can just paint over the fringed areas. And because
they're already selected and because I've got this all nicely protected the only area
that I can paint over is actually the area that is the highlighted area that has the
fringing problem. So if I go over an area that was not a problem the paint or the burning
effect is not even affecting that. So I'm going to ramp up Exposure a little bit more
just to get through this. You would do it more slowly by building up the effect but
I just want to give you something to look at. So Ok, I've ramped it up way higher than
you would and so I'm going to burn some of these leaves a bit too much. But it would
be better if you took this at a slower pace than the pace that I'm attacking it at. But
I just want to show you the results.
What we're doing here is we've isolated the edges that were fringed and that are really
causing problems against our now darker sky. And I'm painting over those to burn them in
to darken the edges and when the edges are darkened the sky is going to blend in a lot
more and we're not going to see this fringing effect. Now the Burn tool arm operates by
addition so the more you lift the paintbrush off the surface and then paint again you're
building up the effect. And as I've said I've got a horrifyingly large value here so I'm
really damaging the sky more than I needed to. But you'll take a better approach at that
when you do it yourself. So let's just zoom out and see what we've got. Now we don't have
the fringing around the edges. The fringing has been removed. I'm going to go to the History
and we'll just wind back History to before we started to attack this image with the Burn
tool and see the difference. This is the before and this is the after. And the sky has blended
into this image a whole lot better than it had. So there's a fairly easy way to get rid
of a fringing effect. First of all replace your sky and then make a selection around
the fringed areas and just burn in the edges so that the sky blends in with the trees and
that you don't get this sort of fringing around the trees.
I'm Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining me for this video tutorial. Look out for more
tutorials on this YouTube channel. And visit my website at Projectwoman.com for more tips,
tricks and tutorials on Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, PaintShop Pro, Lightroom, Illustrator
and a whole lot more.