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