[Rob Barron]

Adding a new sky is nothing new, it has been done since the earliest days of photography in the darkroom, not simply since we got Photoshop! Even the likes of Ansel Adams did this at times so this is NOT cheating. Personally I am of the opinion that nothing is cheating anyway as there is no rule book for photography! The final result is what we are after, and how you get there is frankly up to you!

I know some people have trouble putting a sky from one photo onto another picture so here is a simple tutorial explaining how to do it in Photoshop. The method is not complicated and can be sone with any photo editing software that allows you to use layers, selections and feathering (that's all the main ones that I know of!)

Ok, here we go....

Here's a picture of Dover Castle. Lovely building and lighting but lousy plain sky that rather detracts from the shot.

And here's a sky that would go nicely with the reddish lighting of the stonework. It is showing the feathering tool but I'll come back to that in a few minutes...

What not to do...
This is where a lot of people go wrong though. They use the method: copy the sky across onto a new layer, select the old sky with magic wand, cut it out and have the new sky underneath. That's ok but even with careful selecting, if you have areas like trees (we have here) there will be a tell-tale halo around the castle and through the leaves of the trees as it is nigh on impossible to select every bit of blue without spending an inordinate amount of time!

What to do...
Ok, before we copy across, we are going to make a selection and feather it along the bottom edge. First take the rectangular marquee and select the whole width of the picture from about an inch from the bottom all the way up to the top.

Important step:
Now feather this selection by pressing ctrl+alt+D. Select 30 in the box and close the box. The previous square edge of the selection will now look round.

Now we are going to copy this selection to a new layer by simply pressing Ctrl+J.

If you switch off the bottom (background) layer by clicking on the Eye icon on that layer in the Layers Pallet, you will just see the top layer which will now have an edge that feathers to transparent at the bottom and around the edges. We want it to only have the bottom edge feathered so now make a selection of this layer with the same rectangular marquee tool. Select right from the bottom but about half an inch in from the top left and right. Copy this to a new layer by hitting Ctrl+J and we now have the sky we can use.

Highlight the new selection layer (just click on it on the layers pallet!) and press V to get the Move tool. Click and drag this layer over onto the castle picture. It will now be a new layer on top of the castle. Drag the sky upwards so that its bottom edge is at about the level of the top of the wall as in this screenshot:

Now we are going to select the old sky. To make it easier to see, hide the sky layer (click the Eye icon on the sky layer). Make sure the bottom layer, the picture of the castle, is selected on the Layers pallet.

Using the magic wand (just press W) select the old plain sky, this is not difficult as it has little shade variation. We are NOT going to delete the old sky, we are just going to cut out the edge along the bottom of the new sky.

Once the sky is selected (DON'T WORRY if there looks like there is a bit of a halo in some areas, this won't be a problem

Now we want to invert the selection so that the castle is selected and not the sky. Just press Ctrl+shift+I. The picture now looks like this:

Finally, making sure you have gone to the layers pallet and highlighted the sky layer, hit backspace. This will delete the bottom edge of the sky, neatly around the castle.

Because the bottom of the sky is feathered, we don't need to worry about the deletion cutting neatly around the trees. The soft edge will blend this area naturally.

You will get the final result looking like this:

I hope that is helpful to you. Give it a try and don't worry, it is much easier than it looks here. Just follow the steps one by ne and you'll get it

Cheers,
Rob

[wizbash]

Hi Rob, Thanks for all the info on all the tutorial's, found them all most usefull.
Regards
Mark

[simpbow]

Cheers Rob, give that one ago, Ive done a few different ones before & the end result has been no good [maybe just me] but they weren't as good as this one.