If you are a landscape photographer or real estate photographer, you will find that sky matters. Beautiful sky can make the photo bright and vivid, but dull sky oppositely makes the photo unappealing. So in today article, I would like to share with you a small tip to replace a stunning sky for your photos in Photoshop
Preparation:
– An installed Photoshop software
– A photo which you want to replace the sky
– A beamy sky to replace
How to do sky replacement in Photoshop?
If you have everything ready, now let’s get started
Step 1: Open the photos on Photoshop
Here is the sky which I want to replace. However, there is one thing I should mention here. Both the original photo and the sky should have the same size. You may need to resize one of them.
Here is the final result
Step 2: Blend the images
After open all the images, now you need to blen two of them together. To do it, you need to copy the entirely original photo by pressing Ctrl+A, then Ctrl+C. After doing that, you will see a selection online around the photo like this.
Now to blend them, you open the Sky image and press Ctrl+V on your keyboard. Now look at the Layers panel, you will the original photo on the Layer 1 right above the sky layer
Step 3. Duplicate Layer 1
To duplicate the Layer 1, you can press Ctrl+J on your keyboard. And then you can see a copy of Layer 1 right above the original in the Layers Panel
Step 4: Switch The Top Layer Off
The next steps will be done on the Layer 1, thus, Layer 1 copy should be swtiched off for now by clicking on the eyeball on the left of the layer.
Step 5: Select Layer 1
Let Layer 1 be active by clicking on Layer 1. It will be highlighted in blue
Step 6: Select area below the sky
Now we will draw a selection outline around the area of the photo below the sky which doesn’t contain any sky. We need to take this selection to protect it when we blend the photos. There are a plenty of ways to draw selection online. You can use Photoshop’s standard Lasso Tool or Polygonal Lasso tool by clicking right mouse on Lass Tool icon in the Tools panel.
Or you also can use Pen tool to draw the selection outline too. I prefer to use Pen tool for this task.
Now with the tool in hand, we will focus on solid objects to take the selection. In this photo, that is the house. We will leave the tree because it contains some sky among the leaves.
Step 7: Add a layer mask
Now we will create a layer mask for the protected area by clicking on the Layer Mask icon at the bottom of the Layers panel.
Look at the Layers panel, you can see the the black part and white part.
White part is the selection areas which is till visible while the black part will be hiden from the view. As you can see here:
Step 8: Select And Turn On The Top Layer
Turn on the Layer Copy 1 by clicking on the visibility icon.
Here is what you get.
There is nothing change with this photo, you will need to follow the next step to see how it turns out.
Step 9: Open The Blending Options And Change The “Blend If” Option To Blue
To open the Blending Option, you need to Double-click directly on the Layer Copy 1:
Photoshop’s Layer Style dialog box appears with the Blending Options in the middle column. Now we only need to focus on Blending If option which is set to Gray by default.
Click on the word “Gray” and choose “Blue” from the appeared list.
Step 10: Drag The Top Right Slider Towards The Left
Once choosing Blue, you will see the changes in two slider bars from black-to-white gradients to black-to-blue gradients. No need to focus on the “Underlying layer” (which is at the bottom). Just need to focus on the top bar. Now to adjust the sky, you just need to drag the slider below the far right of the top bar to the left:
By dragging the slider, you will see the change in the original sky. The replacement sky is gradually appeared without affected to the aera which we selected in Step 6. Keep dragging the slider until the original sky disappears.
Step 11: Remove Fringing between the photos
As you can see, around the trees and leaves, there are a lot of harsh edges and fringing which is left from the original sky. However, we can fix that by softening the transition between the photos.
How to do that? No worries. I will show you now. To make the transition between the photo smoother you will need to split the slider in half by holding the Alt button on your keyboard, then slightly move the sliders. You will see the slider split into two halves which you can move them independently. Now you can adjust the softness of the transition between the original photo and the replacement sky photo by increasing or decreasing the distance between the two halves of the slider.
And here is what I get:
That’s it for sky replacement. It is super easy if you spend time practising it. Having a great real estate photographs is not too difficult as everyone might think. Check out our 10 amazing tips for real estate photography to learn some tips and tricks.