Sublime sunsets

James Paterson enhances dull skies in your landscapes by dropping in a dramatic sunset with simple Photoshop CC skills

Weather not playing ball? Fake it in Photoshop!

Sunrise and sunset may be the best times of the day for landscape photography, but they’re both rather inconvenient aren’t they? In this project, there’s no need to get up before the crack of dawn or wait all day for the setting sun. Instead, we’ll show you how you can fake it in Photoshop CC.

Of course, there’s no real substitute for being there, taking the shot and experiencing the moment. But if that’s not possible, then there’s always the option to fake it later.

Purists would call this downright cheating, but the only naughty act would be to pass it off as a genuine capture rather than a composite (as the infamous winner of the 2012 Landscape Photographer of the Year contest found out when stripped of his title for digitally altering clouds in a photo of Lindisfarne).

Besides, as long as you can get past the moral scruples about sky replacement, there are other benefits to a Photoshop project such as this. It introduces fundamental Photoshop skills like making selections, layer masking and blending modes.

We’ll begin here by selecting the sky using the excellent Select and Mask command, which not only gives us a great tool for making the selection – the Quick Selection brush – but also allows us to refine the edge of the selection for a seamless cut-out. Once done, we can drop in our new sunset. From here on, it’s all about matching the tones so the whole thing looks natural.

Sunrise and sunset may be the best times of the day for landscape photography, but they’re both rather inconvenient aren’t they?