Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this
video tutorial. In this tutorial I'm
going to show you how to replace a sky
using a tool called Blend If.
This helps you avoid making complex
selections.
There are lots of ways of replacing
skies and this is another one. And I
really love it for some images that
already have some sky detail.
So let's see how we do this.
Before we start with this effect let's
have a look and see what it is that we're
trying to achieve.
This is the original image I had here and
you can see that there are trees along
this horizon line
which are going to make replacing the sky
nearly impossible because there is no why that
you want to make a selection around those
trees.
But this is the result that we can
achieve. We've got some blue in the sky
here. I can increase the opacity up
so we could get quite a blue sky.
But I think probably around 50 percent
opacity is about the best that we're
going to get for this image. But I've done
this in a matter of about five minutes
and certainly I have not made a
selection
of those trees. So let's see how we
would get this effect.
So I'm going back to my original image and
I'm going to show you the sky image I
have.
I tend to save skies. Whenever I
see a good sky I'll go and capture an
image of it because you never know when you
might need a sky so I'm just going to
put this sky image out the way. I just
want its background layer. I'm just going to drag and
drop it into position on this image.
If I hold Shift at the same time it gets
centered.
You can see it's a little bit small but
I'm just going to drag the sides
of it. I'm not worried that I'm not
constraining it to the correct proportions
because it's clouds in the skyline. Nobody is
going to know what they really were suppose
to look like
so I've just got rid of my sky image.
So here we have in our original
document
we have our
snow scene on the bottom and we have
our sky on the top. And what we want to do
is to start seeing some of the snow
scene through the sky.
And the way we do it is with a tool called
Blend If. I'm going to select this
Effects or Add a
Layer Style icon here and I'm choosing Blending
options. And this is a tool that you've
probably never used before.
It's down the bottom here in this
Blending options.
And what it allows us to do is to blend
these two layers together so watch what
happens when I start dragging on the
underlying layer slider.
You can see that the trees start coming
through and so does the rest of this image.
Now I want to stop
at the point where I get the sky through
because I actually really want my blue
sky so you can see here that this is
giving me
my blue sky. And it's bleeding into the
snow, but I'm not really worried about
that at all because I've got a really
strong horizon line across here
that I can make a very simple selection
of in a minute.
The problem is of course that I've got a
sort of all or nothing approach.
This is the point where the
blending is happening.
If the layer below is anywhere in this sort
of darkness level up to 146
I am seeing the image below. If it's
lighter than 146 I'm seeing the
image above. Now
this little slider can be split in two and
we're going to split it in two by holding
the Alt key and dragging
one side of it away.
And what we do by doing that is
actually spreading the area in which
the two layers are blended together so we're
getting a smoother transition.
And all we need to do now is to work out
where it is that we're going to get the
best results. So
I'm looking for
some blending of these trees. And this is
a JPG image. And it's a
fairly low quality JPG from a fairly
old camera so it's not going to give
me the best results. But I'm still going
to get an image
that's going to look okay.
I just need to be a little bit
careful where I set
these values. And I'm
also going to lighten this sky a bit
later on.
So I think these values are pretty good.
And again, all I'm interested in is
what's happening around the trees
not any of this foreground detail so I'll just
click Ok.
Now obviously we do have a problem with
the snow here because the
blue sky has bled into the snow so I'm
just going to
grab
literally a rectangular marquee tool
and just select over the entire bottom
of the image because I want all of this
to be out of this filter effect.
So I'm going to click here to add a layer
mask to this layer.
And the layer mask has gone in the wrong way
around so I'm just going to press
Ctrl or Command I to flip it. You can
see now that the snow has been totally
removed from this effect.
There is however some legacy problems in
the mountains behind but that is really
easy to fix.
I'm just clicking on the Brush tool and I'm
going to choose a slightly soft edge
brush.
And now I'm just going to size it
to make it
work so just using the Square Bracket
key I'm painting with black. I have my
mask targeted.
All I'm going to do is to just
paint over these areas
where the
snow on the mountains behind has a
blue tinge.
That's all I'm interested in.
And
there's some more snow in there. I'm just going to
make sure that we
bring this out so that the trees that are in
front of the mountain
do not have any blue tinge in them. And
this is just the world's simplest paint
job.
Anybody can paint that out. It's not rocket
science at all.
Now I'm just going to drag down the opacity
of this top layer to blend it in
a little bit
with the layer below.
And I thought probably about 60
percent on the original.
No, it's still probably going to be about
60 percent.
So here's our original image and here's
the new image with the sky in place.
And it's been done using the
Blend If feature in Photoshop,
a nice simple tool to use when you've got
an image like this where it's
fairly easy to replace the sky if you
don't have to make the selection
around all of those trees.
I'm Helen Bradley. Thank you for joining
me for this video tutorial. If you liked
this tutorial please subscribe to my
YouTube channel,
Like the video
and look out on my website at
projectwoman.com for more tips, tricks and
tutorials for Photoshop, Photoshop
Elements and Lightroom.
