Changing a Sky Background in Photoshop

Learn how to replace the sky in your photography in just a few short steps in Adobe Photoshop.

What do you do with a sky that's dark and stormy, blown out, or just plain ordinary? You can spend hours trying to enhance it, or you can replace it in just a few simple steps. Chris Orwig shows you how in this Portrait Project. He'll show you how to make and refine a selection, mask out the sky, and insert a new, more dramatic sky—all in Adobe Photoshop. In order to make your replacement look natural, Chris spends the second half of the course showing how to improve the detail, color, and tone of your new composite.

Introduction

• Welcome
• Using the exercise files

1. Replacing an Ordinary Sky with Clouds

• Combining multiple files together
• Selecting the sky
• Refining the selection and building a mask
• Repositioning the clouds

2. Improving Details, Color, and Tone

• Transforming and flipping the clouds
• Using Refine Mask to improve edge detail
• Using the Minimum filter to clean up edges
• Correcting the horizon line

Conclusion

• Next steps