A little bit about Changing Skies….

With my last post I talked about changing a photograph from the actual image capture to that of adding a different sky.  To many of us the issue is a lot about making the image as interesting as possible and not necessarily stay true to what the weather was that particular day.  I think the change should most usually be identified. We can’t always be at the right place at the optimum time to get that soft blue sky with the puffy white clouds.  So…. we change it.   And… that’s not always easy to do.

A little now (very brief) about my current preferred technique(s);  When I first began doing this I’d always make a selection of the drab sky by using a variety of the selection tools and “cutting it out”, leaving a “hole” which I would then fill by pasting another sky into into it.  Then…  came learning some about the magic of LAYERS and I’d locate the replacement sky “behind”, really under the foreground layer so it would be visible thru “the hole”.   I marveled at how we can make an interesting image even on a wet and overcast Northwest Winter day.

Then a few months ago I saw (and I’ll enthusiastically recommend the source;  Michael Rather with The Digital Photography Connection,   http://www.thedigitalphotographyconnection.com) a tutorial to remove skies by using blending modes accessed thru the BLENDING OPTIONS in the LAYER STYLE dialogue box and I love how it can work.  You have to do some fine tuning with most images.  A problem I had a few days ago was when a barn roof had very similar (to the clouds) shades of gray on the metal roof panels.  BLENDING OPTIONS lets you choose the shade of gray you want to replace and my problem was that it wanted to put sky in place of my barn panels.   I think what I did then was darken the affected spots some with the burn tool to make my roof panels “stay in place”.

I’m going to close this post now and maybe come back with some examples showing the blending option system.     Thanks again.  If you have questions please feel free to email to me.  I’ll respond.