Adobe set the standard in photo manipulation with their Photoshop and Photoshop Elements software suites, giving end users a plethora of professional level controls at their fingertips. But if you're new to Photoshop, the learning curve can be overwhelming, making even simple tasks complicated click-and-hunt affairs. As part of an ongoing series, we'll be providing bite-sized, easy to follow tips covering a variety of tricks. Today, we show you how to replace a photo's sky with one that might be more interesting, and using the same method, you'll be able to manipulate any part of a photo you wish to change. Let's get started!
Adobe set the standard in photo manipulation with their Photoshop and Photoshop Elements software suites, giving end users a plethora of professional level controls at their fingertips. But if you're new to Photoshop, the learning curve can be overwhelming, making even simple tasks complicated click-and-hunt affairs. As part of an ongoing series, we'll be providing bite-sized, easy to follow tips covering a variety of tricks. Today, we show you how to replace a photo's sky with one that might be more interesting, and using the same method, you'll be able to manipulate any part of a photo you wish to change. Let's get started!
Open the image with the sky you wish to replace.
Duplicate the layer by dragging the ‘background layer’ to the ‘create a new layer’ icon.
Using the selection brushes, select the sky. If the sky is generally one color use the magic wand and then use the selection brush to add any missed or hard to reach areas. By using the left bracket key ‘[‘ you can decrease your brush size, while the right bracket key ‘]’ can quickly increase the brush size.
Press the ‘delete’ key to remove your selected portion of the image. Be sure to click on the eye next the background layer. If you don’t it will not look like anything changed.
The sky should be gone and you should see a black and white checker pattern or a white background, depending on your settings.
Now navigate to the Select menu and choose Inverse.
Then under the same menu, click on Feather.
Choose a feather radius between 1 and 5, with the philosophy that the higher the resolution of the image, the higher the ratio should be. In this example I used a radius of 4. This will blur the edges slightly and give a more natural look to the edge that was deleted.
Choose Select > Deselect
Where your sky was should now be either a black and white checker pattern or its white.
Open the image you want to place the selection of sky with, and duplicate the layer as just as we did with the original photo. For this example I used an image I took of just the sky.
Using the move tool, hold the Shift key down and drag the new sky into the image you want to place it in and release the mouse button.
At this point you will notice that the picture you just moved has been placed on its own layer.
Drag this new layer below the other photo and choose ‘Select’ ïƒ ‘Deselect’
Viola! Your sky has been replaced. Don't forget to save your work in .PSD (In PSD, TIFF or RAW your image will not degrade every time you open and save it). But you're not done just yet! Under the Layer menu, choose Flatten Image. Then you're ready for the last step, which is to use the Unsharpen Mask.
