Add new skies the easy way
Jon Adams shows how to give any photo a new look with tons of impact by using a creative sky transplant
In this digital age, there are two schools of thought in photography. One says you use your skill and judgement to capture a single moment in time in-camera, while the other says you use all your skills and judgement to create the best possible image. With these two extremes, most of us are on a sliding scale somewhere between the two: even a photo purist will push the adjustments in Raw conversion software to eke out the best version of what they got in the can.
You’ll find that the Sky Replacement tool in Adobe Photoshop CC definitely pushes you out towards the second school of thought: it presents an opportunity to import a sky taken at a different time and place to create the best possible image.
Although this has, of course, always been possible with the right technical know-how, it’s now quicker and easier. Here, we’ll look at how it’s done, and how you can add our free Sky Pack – or your own skies – to your arsenal of choices.
ABOUT YOUR SKY PACK Within our project files there are 25 free skies of varying mood; by importing them into the Sky Replacement tool, you can add them to your images in just a few clicks. You can also add your own sky images in the same way.
The Sky Replacement command
Open the photograph on which you want to change the sky into Photoshop, or use our supplied Buoy.jpg image for practice. Once it’s on-screen, go to Edit>sky Replacement and click in the Sky box to open a drop-down menu. This is where you’ll see three preloaded folder groups called Blue Skies, Spectacular and Sunsets – these are your 25 free skies. Expand these with the drop-down arrows alongside their names. To get the hang of how it all works, you first need to choose a sky of a similar tone to the existing one in your reference picture and click on it. Once you’re happy, click off the box to close the sky preview thumbnails, and you’ll see a number of sliders at your disposal.
Fine-tune your foreground
To get the foreground to sit naturally on the new sky, you can change the lighting style, and how warm or cool it appears. Also critical is the Lighting Mode used – you can choose between Screen and Multiply blending modes. Photoshop will make its best guess, based on the data in the sky and in the scene, but you may need to tweak the sliders to get the best results. Once the lighting has a good match, move down to the Color Adjustment slider, where you can warm up or cool down the foreground to match your chosen sky. For complete control, set Output to New Layers, as this will leave all the adjustments in an editable state. If you’re happy with the new look, though, choose Duplicate Layer to fix the changes in place.
Take a tour of the tools
Shift Edge enables you to adjust the way the new sky interacts with the existing sky in your shot. Moving the slider left reveals more of the old sky, and moving it right will increase the dominance of the new one. Fade Edge makes this interaction more or less feathered to help get a natural blend. Normally somewhere around halfway on these sliders will give a natural-looking result. The Sky Adjustments sliders enables you to make the replacement sky brighter or darker, and warmer or cooler in colour temperature. Scale lets you enlarge or reduce the sky’s size to change the way it works with the foreground. Use this with the Move tool (top left) to alter the sky’s position, and tick the Flip checkbox to laterally reverse it.
Add our skies, or your own!
Copy the Sky Pack folder from the download to somewhere appropriate on your computer. To add them – or your own skies
– to the options on offer, click on the Sky box at the top, then click the small + icon at the foot of the palette. Next, navigate through your system to find the skies you’ve copied over, and select the one that you want to try out in your images. Click OK when the Sky Name box pops up, then select it, following the steps above, to add it to your picture. At the time of writing, you have to add new skies one by one, but a future Photoshop update may allow multiple skies to be added at the same time, potentially making for some exciting editing opportunities.