Transcript:
Today I’m going to show you The brand new sky replacement automatic tool in Photoshop. Hey, there and welcome to phlearn. My name is Aaron Nace today. We’re going to show you Photoshop’s brand new sky replacement technology. But we’re also going to talk about how and why to use this. It’s important to note that the sky lights the ground, for instance. If you have a sunny day, you’re going to have hard shadows on the ground. If you have a cloudy day, you’re going to have soft shadows on the ground. So today we’re going to talk about choosing the correct image to replace your sky. Here we are in Photoshop. You can download this image as well as the PSD on Phlearnco’m. Just follow the link right down below, so whenever I’m analyzing lighting in an image, I like to start off with the shadows because it gives you a good idea of the quality of the light and the direction of the light, so let’s go ahead and zoom in, and as we can see super clearly here, we have a shadow on the right hand side of this lighthouse, which lets us know that the light source, in this case, it’s the sun is coming from the left hand side. Now we can also get a little bit more specific with directionality by following the lines of the shadows. For instance, you can see this shadow here falls at an angle, just like that as well as this shadows falling at that same angle, and that is falling at the same angle. This actually gives us a really good idea of the direction of the sun. All we have to do is just put an arrow there. We go on the top of these and we can see that’s. The direction of the sun. So we’ve got a bright, sunny day with relatively hard shadows and the sun. It’s not in this image, but we could assume if we just follow this line straight up there. That is about the direction of the sun, so it’s probably off camera just over here. Then you can see it here. We have a railing and the shadow for your railing as well, so we always want to analyze the lighting in our original image because that’s going to give us a good idea of how to create a great composite, even for things like sky replacement, which technically is a composite so for instance, if I chose a new sky and I composited it together beautifully with perfect seams, but the sun was over here instead. Let’s just put a nice sun right there. If the sun was over here, it would not look right. No matter how technically perfect you made this photo, The sun would be in the wrong place with the directionality of the shadows. So we just want to make sure let’s go ahead and grab this guy. I’m going to grab my move tool. We would want to make sure the sun is about there or in that realm. We also want to make sure we’re not using an image that is an overly cloudy day because you can see. We have relatively well-defined shadows here in this photo, meaning it’s a sunny day, we can clearly see the sun. Also, we don’t want to choose a sunset for this image because the sun is clearly relatively high in the sky, so choosing a sunset just won’t work, all right, so all that stuff out of the way let’s go ahead and take a look at our new sky replacement tool. I recommend just making a duplicate of your background layer, so we’re going hit control or command J to duplicate that, and we’re gonna go to edit and down to, uh, uh, oh, brand new in our menu sky replacement, and I gotta say this tool is incredible. That does a very, very good job. We have skies that are already included. We can see, we’ve got a few different folders here. Blue Skies, sun sets and spectacular. Of course, you can add your own sky. If you want to, we’re just going to go ahead and go through some of these skies, so I haven’t touched any of the default settings here. I’m literally just clicking on each one of these guys, and it’s doing it for me, so that like. What else do you want out of life? It’s pretty easy, so this is actually a fantastic image that will work and the reason being is we can see. We have highlights on the top side of the cloud shadows on the bottom side, and they match relatively well with what’s going on in our image. Now, let’s go ahead and take a look at some of our sunsets, and we can see Photoshop as a tool is going to do a very nice job. Integrating these new sunset skies into this image, however, these photos no matter what we do to them are not going to look realistic because the direction of the light is completely different from the direction of the light in the original images, so it’s super important that we pay attention to our lighting direction and choose a photograph That’s going to mimic that, so let’s go back through our blue skies. You can see, we have quite a few examples, honestly. I thought this one worked pretty. Well, right here, there we go. This is my favorite, it’s nice. You can just kind of click through them now. We do have a couple of tools that we can use. Obviously there’s a little preview icon which will show you your before and after you can hit control or command plus and then use your space bar to move around your image, so you can see this a little bit larger and get an idea of how it’s handling things like edges. You can always fade your edges, less or more and honestly, this is kind of just a click and drag set of sliders. You can shift your edge one way or another way there. We go now. The thing that I love about this tool is the fact that we do have some edge refinement built into it. So I can grab my refine edge brush right here and I can simply add or remove sky. So, for instance, if it didn’t get in that little area, I could paint in there and it would add my sky to that area. If I wanted to remove something, I’ll simply hold alt or option and I could remove sky from a certain area. If I wanted to do it as well if it didn’t give me a perfect composite now we can also adjust things like our brightness, so obviously the sky can be brighter or darker. This is an important step as we’ll. See how this dark sky doesn’t really look that good. The highlights in the sky don’t match the highlights in our building, so we want to make sure we match our brightness levels as well. There we go a little bit darker and that’s looking really good. Now your color temperature. We can see by turning the preview off and on our color temperature. In this case, we can make it a little bit warmer to try to match the original image. There we go or we can get a little bit cooler. In this case? A little bit warmer looks better. You can flip the sky horizontally, which is fantastic in this case. We’re going to keep it like this because of the direction of the sunlight, and you’ve got some foreground adjustments. You can choose whether you want it to be screen, blend mode or multiply blend mode. This is basically takes a copy of the background and places it over top of the sky so really, when it comes to these two blending modes, it’s kind of whichever one looks better, and in this case, it’s going to be screen. It’s going to be different for every image. So make sure you go ahead. This is, uh, by default closed. Make sure you go ahead and open that up. You’ve got a lot more options here, and then you can adjust the lighting of the foreground and the color of the foreground to be consistent with the background here in this case. The color adjustment’s not going on. There’s not a ton going on there now. My favorite thing about all of this is the fact that you can choose how you want to output it, so you can choose this to be new layers or duplicate layers, and when we output this, it’s just going to look like regular adjustment layers with the layer masks built in, so let’s go ahead and hit, OK? I’m going to choose new layers. That’s my preference here, so let’s hit OK? And we can see in a group, A sky replacement group. I I really gotta hand it to the folks at the Photoshop team. They’ve done a great job. This is exactly how you’d want this sort of tool to work it’s non-destructive. It’s broken up into layers and groups using adjustment layers. The reason this is fantastic is that you can turn any of these off and on at any time sky temperature, the sky itself, my foreground lighting. I can turn this off and on the foreground color, For instance, if I was in my sky replacement dialog and I didn’t choose it. Bright, bright enough. Let’s say I chose, you know, the brightness down a little bit. You could simply go back in here and up your brightness. There we go and everything is going to simply work as it Should. You also have your layer masks. So if you hold alt or option, you can click on those layer masks and see what they look like. See, here’s where I painted a little bit of a negative area around there. If I want to clean this up, I’m going to hit my brush tool. So we’re going to hit B for the brush tool. We’re just going to make a large soft edge brush, Okay, I’m going to paint white with my for as my foreground color, and I’m going to change my blend mode of the brush to overlay. Okay, and what this is going to do? Is it’s going to further refine these edges so you can see? It was a little bit fuzzy in some of these areas by painting white on your layer mask in overlay blend mode. There we go and this is the blend mode of the brush, not the layer. The overlay blend mode is really nice because it’ll take your light areas and make them lighter while keeping the dark areas still dark. All right, there we go and I’m going to go ahead and switch to black, and I’m going to fill in my dark areas and this is going to help there. We go with that masking, so I know it’s not a perfect job as of yet, but it looks pretty dang good, and if you wanted to go in here and further refine your layer mask by painting this in there, we go, you could simply go ahead and paint this in here if you wanted to do that. As well, so I’ve used other sky replacement tools in the past that don’t give you access to a layer mask like this one does, and honestly, I really like the ability to edit my layer mask. After the fact, I can just clean it up If there are little areas that aren’t perfect because it’s an automatic tool. It’s not going to be perfect in every situation now. Big suggestion here when you’re done using your brush in overlay blend mode, make sure to go right back up here and change your mode from overlay back to normal, okay. That’s really tripped me up in the past. Where it’s I left it on overlay, and I’m trying to use my brush on a new layer and nothing is working and I can’t figure out why it was because my brush was still in that overlay blend mode. Just don’t want it to get you tripped up there, but here we can hold alt or option and click back on our sky, and we have a beautiful sky replacement. I think this guy is a little bit bright, so we’re just going to bring that a little bit darker and find a nice mid ground there. Now, also just turning this off and on you can see the original sky wasn’t very saturated. You can see not a lot of saturation here. Well, guess what I can just grab a hue saturation adjustment layer. Okay, clip, click on my little clipping mask icon. Here you see this icon here. It’s going to clip this layer. Okay, you’ll see this little down arrow here when a layer is clipped and as you follow it down, it’s going to affect the sky, so my hue saturation adjustment layer. I can have only affect the sky. Look at this! I can make it horrible or I could make it actually work. Well, but what I’m doing is trying to match the saturation of the original image. So turn this off and on you can see. We have a saturation shift and the original image wasn’t very saturated. So in this case, I’m actually going to take this down a little bit more there we go because I want to match the lighting of the original photograph there. We go look, that’s actually looking really good. Our lighting is looking good. You can change our hue a little bit too, which would actually change the hue of the sky. We’re going to pull this a little bit to the left. Introduce a little bit more cyan and look at that there. We go a little bit more and there we go Sky replacement done in a matter of minutes again. Super easy to do. You can just turn this layer off and on at any time, it does a great job. Earlier in the video, we talked about lighting direction and analyzing the light of the original photo and choosing the appropriate sky. That’s really the big key to making this a successful tool for you. Thank you so much for watching today’s video. If you want to learn even more about Photoshop, Lightroom and photography, check out, learn pro, we’ve got an exclusive discount for you in the link. Right down below. Thanks again, I’ll learn you later. Bye, everyone!