Pep up your landscape shots with a new sky

Add drama and impact to any scenic shot with our Skies Kit and Photoshop’s Sky Replacement Tool

When it comes to shooting landscapes, we can’t always be in the right place at the right time. If you’re in a good location, the first of these boxes will automatically be ticked, but getting the right conditions to coincide with the time you are there is down to the whims of Mother Nature! You may have the bones of a great scenic shot in the viewfinder, but if the sky is a dull grey – or an equally dull, plain, cloudless blue – all you can do is wait, and hope.

If your schedule means you can’t wait for the light to change, this technique gives you a digital route to a better shot. It involves the process of compositing, where an image is created from different components. This is a skill used all the time in areas like commercial and advertising photography, where the impact of the end result is what counts, and not the ‘purity’ of the process used to get there.

Whether you want your landscapes to be composited from different pictures depends on your taste and ethical approach, but as with all creative endeavour, there’s never any harm in learning the skills employed to achieve a task.

Start the Sky Replacement Tool 1

Open a picture with an unsatisfactory sky into Photoshop CC, or use my shot of Stanage (in the Start Images folder of this issue’s download) for practice. When it’s on screen, go to Edit > Sky Replacement and click in the Sky box to open a dropdown menu. If you haven’t used this tool before or changed anything, you’ll see the default folder groups, called Blue Skies, Spectacular and Sunsets. Open these up with the arrows next to the names, and click on any sky to pick one you think will suit your foreground.

Once you’ve decided on a sky that fits your scene, don’t click OK at the bottom, but click off the box to close the sky thumbnails, and a bunch of sliders will be revealed.

We’ll go on to use these next…

Relight your foreground interest 3

You may need to fine-tune the way the foreground appears in terms of the ‘join’ between it and the sky, as well as its colour temperature and brightness. Lighting Mode lets you choose between different layer Blending Modes (Screen or Multiply), which subtly affects how the foreground ‘sits’ under the sky. Once the lighting looks good, Color Adjustment enables you to add amber warmth or blue coolness to the foreground to get a good match. Photoshop will make its best guess for all these settings, but it’s worth playing with the sliders to see if you can do better! If you set Output to New Layers, you’ll be able to access all the individual layers; Duplicate Layer creates a single new layer.

Explore the controls 2

Replacing skies used to take ages before the arrival of the

Sky Replacement Tool, but now you can make light work of the task once you’ve gained some familiarity with the controls.

Shift Edge lets you change the way the new sky interacts with your original sky. Moving it left will show more of the old sky, and moving it right will make the new one more prominent. Fade Edge allows you to feather the blend and achieve a natural-looking result. The Sky Adjustments sliders let you to make the new sky more or less bright, and adjust the colour temperature. With Scale you can make the new sky bigger or smaller, and Move lets you shift it around and change the position of the sky detail. If you want your sky to be the other way round, tick the Flip box.

Import your new sky kit 4

Drag the Skies Kit folder from the download to somewhere easy to find on your computer. To add them to the Sky Replacement Tool, click the Sky box at the top, then click the cog icon at the top-right. Select Create New Sky Group and give it a name, such as DCM Skies; after highlighting this new group in the list, click the cog again and select Import Skies > From Images. Find the Skies Kit folder you copied to your computer, and click on the ones you want to add while holding Ctrl/Cmd. Now click Open, and the skies will be loaded into the tool for you to use as above. Take some sky shots when you’re next out with your camera, and you can add your own custom skies in exactly the same way.