Using Sky Replacement in Photoshop 2023

 So as you know when taking photographs, we have one vision in our mind's eye but the camera sees something completely different. Well, the camera sees what is actually in front of it and not necessarily what our creative thoughts are conjuring up. Cameras are literal where as our thoughts are fluid, right?

So here I am shooting a condo for a real estate agent friend of mine and I ask; "Can we go up on the roof to get some "bird's eye" view shots?" So I am thinking that this is going to be great and I have all kinds of possibilities running through my head and then reality kicks in .... cloudy and more clouds are rolling in.

Oh well, let's see what can be in post. Then I start thing what if I change the sky to be more like a sunset ...

So I go under the Edit Menu in Photoshop and choose "Sky Replacement" just to see what my options are.

After searching through some of the options I find this sunset sky ...

In the sky replacement window there are quite a few to choose from and I chose this one. On the left hand side of this dialog near the top are four tools - just hold your cursor over each tool to see what it can do for you but they are basically navigation tools - the fun stuff is found under the sky replacement preview window. The first two deal with refining the edge of the new sky; you can shift the edge up or down depending on where your horizon is in the image and you can fade the edge based on the content at your horizon. You can also play with the brightness and the colour temperature and scale the new sky.

Next there is an option to flip the sky, make some foreground adjustments and set the output. The foreground adjustments allow you to change the blend modes from Multiply and Screen depending on whether you want to darken or lighten things. Then you have Foreground Lightening, Edge Lightening and Color Adjustment which is more of a lightening or darkening effect than a real colour adjustment.

For the Output choices you have New Layers or Duplicate Layer. In the image below you can see that I have chosen New Layers - Photoshop put these new layers inside a new folder named Sky Replacement. Now because I want to make some more adjustments to this by adding some warmth to the foreground area to try to make the new sky, I created A merged composite layer at the top of the layer stack.

Next what I did was use a filter from my NIK Collection to add that warmth.

The effect of this particular filter is too strong for my liking but instead of playing around with any of the slider values, I have opted to reduce the NIK layer's opacity down to 70% as you can see in the last image here.

The last thing to do is to save this image as a multi-layered psd file to preserve the image edits for possible future changes and then do a Save As ... and convert it to a jpeg file for sharing on social media platforms. You may want to resize this image as well depending on the image guidelines of the various social media platforms. I did the format conversion of the size reduction all in one task by running the image through Photoshop's Image Processor inside Adobe Bridge. In Bridge locate your image and then go to the Tools Menu > Photoshop > Image Processor ...

Until next time ...