I am not a fan of altering images in post processing by adding or removing objects in the image. Adobe Photoshop recently added a Sky replacement feature. This feature is quite interesting to learn. I was taking some couple photos outside and it is raining all day this week, so the sky is grey all the time. Sky replacement helps to add some colorful skies into the images quite easily in some simple clicks. I have heard about some expensive plugins that uses the socalled Artificial Intelligence to do sky replacement in single click. Photoshop does this pretty fast compared to third party plugin.  It was fun to learn  sky replacement in Photoshop. You could add your own sky to replace or pick one from the free images provided by Photoshop.

This is a sample image after post processing using sky replacement. Muraleedharan

This is the original image. The entire processing took under five minutes to finish. Muraleedharan   

The steps to replace sky:

Select the ‘Sky Replacement…’ from the Edit menu in Photoshop.

You can pick one sky from the available options, or you can upload your own.

You can make several adjustment after selecting the sky.  Shift edge, adjust temperature and brightness, Change scale, color adjustment, move the sky position etc. are some of them. The dialog that provides all these options is easy to learn, it is all sliders and pop down menu selections.

What can we do if there is water in the foreground ?  If there is water and if the sky is colorful, then naturally there will be a reflection in the water if the water is calm. Photoshop  do not have the capability to create a reflection, so we have to make our own. I created  my own  reflection.

Here are the steps for making a reflection of the sky in the water.

• Rasterize the layers using Ctrl-Alt-Shift-E in Windows and  Command-Alt-Shift-E in Mac
• Make a duplicate layer
• Flip the duplicate layer vertically (  Edit -> Transform -> Flip vertical)  
• Change the opacity of the layer to 50% so that you can also see the layer underneath it.
• Add a layer mark
• Hide the mask using Ctrl-I
• Use a white brush and reveal the contents in the foreground water.
• Reduce the opacity of the brush from 100-50% gradually when you move from  center of the water to the edge of the water, so the change looks natural.
• After you finish working with the brush, change the opacity of the duplicate layer to 100%.

Voila, you are done with the adjustments.

You can now continue with your usual post processing of a landscape image by changing Saturation, Sharpness, Noise etc. to your taste. 
     

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