Help with sky

herion

I'm sort of at a loss at this point ... I took this shot on an overcast day and the sky is kinda blown out.

I'd like to add a bluer sky with clouds but here are my questions:

1. Do I make a "cloud" layer and paste the foreground into it?
2. How do I select the sky peeping around the leaves?
3.How do I select the sky properly and not leave white edge lines?
4. Do I mask?
5. What blending modes do I use?

While I've used Photoshop PS, I'm still consider myself a beginner and I'd appreciate a step-by-step here so at least I could learn to handle a situation like this the right way from the beginning.

Thanks in advance,

http://www.mindspring.com/~kevinpray/img_1513.jpg

Richard

herion wrote:

I'm sort of at a loss at this point ... I took this shot on an overcast day and the sky is kinda blown out.

I'd like to add a bluer sky with clouds but here are my questions:

1. Do I make a "cloud" layer and paste the foreground into it?
2. How do I select the sky peeping around the leaves?
3.How do I select the sky properly and not leave white edge lines?
4. Do I mask?
5. What blending modes do I use?

While I've used Photoshop PS, I'm still consider myself a beginner and I'd appreciate a step-by-step here so at least I could learn to handle a situation like this the right way from the beginning.

Thanks in advance,

http://www.mindspring.com/~kevinpray/img_1513.jpg

I am by no means an expert, but unless you have a really compelling reason to put a blue sky in there I think you would be better off leaving it as is. It looks to me like some parts of the buildings are blown out as well, so you will either have to clone them out altogether or do some pretty fancy stuff to make it look natural. I have never had a whole lot success blending in other layers around tree branches, but hopefully someone who really knows how to do it will speak up.

You have some interesting stuff in that pic. Why does the sky have to be blue?

cletus

rsinmadrid wrote:

I am by no means an expert, but unless you have a really compelling reason to put a blue sky in there I think you would be better off leaving it as is. It looks to me like some parts of the buildings are blown out as well, so you will either have to clone them out altogether or do some pretty fancy stuff to make it look natural. I have never had a whole lot success blending in other layers around tree branches, but hopefully someone who really knows how to do it will speak up.

I think to get a blue sky in that image and have it look good is going to take a lot of work.

For example, the overexposed sky bleeds around the edges of the leaves. You would have to find some way of repairing the leaves so they didn't look odd on the blue background.

In addition, you've got a lot of reflections that show a bland bright sky. If you replaced the sky you'd have to modify the reflections as well.

XO-Studios

I agree with the two above posts, however if I were to do it anyways, I would create a couple of alpha channels using multiplys and subtract functions between the blue, green and red channels to create a necessary mask.

I would use those to refine a selection strictly by color range (under select in PS)

Work on the reflections by using a treshold mask and change the saturation on them.

Now experts will be able to tell, but it will foll the casual onlooker.

FWIW,

XO,

digismile

I agree with XO that using color range is a good way to go. It allows you to make a a very good first selection because most of the blownout areas are the sky. After you make your first selection with color range, toggle back into quick mask mode so that you can edit the mask along the edges of the building and the light. I would save the selection as a path, so that if you need to modify the selection you can re-create it easily later on.

What I did next was add a layer and filled it with a sky blue (now the entire screen is blue). I then used the saved path to create a layer mask to only reveal the selected area. Now you should have a pretty good blue sky. You can easily touch up areas along the buildings, etc. if you need more/less sky.

I would use a different stategy on the leaves. There were too many spots to fix in a short period of time. I would simply cover the problem areas over with new leaf material. Since there are plenty of leaf areas with no sky bleed, I would select a small random chunk using the magic wand with a fairly small tolerance setting (10-15), set for contiguous. Copy this piece to a new layer (Ctrl-J), and use the move tool to move it into some of the tree gap areas. Repeat using different parts from the tree. How would I know the tree didn't have more branches and leaves?:D

My last step was to select the blue sky layer and run the Filter->Render->Clouds filter.

I spent about 10 minutes on this photo (less time than it took me to figure out what to type here!). A bit more time should give you the results you want. As XO stated, the casual onlooker won't even notice. It all comes down to how much effort you want to put in and how perfect you need it to be.

Brad

cletus

digismile wrote:

I agree with XO that using color range is a good way to go. It allows you to make a a very good first selection because most of the blownout areas are the sky. After you make your first selection with color range, toggle back into quick mask mode so that you can edit the mask along the edges of the building and the light. I would save the selection as a path, so that if you need to modify the selection you can re-create it easily later on.

What I did next was add a layer and filled it with a sky blue (now the entire screen is blue). I then used the saved path to create a layer mask to only reveal the selected area. Now you should have a pretty good blue sky. You can easily touch up areas along the buildings, etc. if you need more/less sky.

I would use a different stategy on the leaves. There were too many spots to fix in a short period of time. I would simply cover the problem areas over with new leaf material. Since there are plenty of leaf areas with no sky bleed, I would select a small random chunk using the magic wand with a fairly small tolerance setting (10-15), set for contiguous. Copy this piece to a new layer (Ctrl-J), and use the move tool to move it into some of the tree gap areas. Repeat using different parts from the tree. How would I know the tree didn't have more branches and leaves?:D

My last step was to select the blue sky layer and run the Filter->Render->Clouds filter.

I spent about 10 minutes on this photo (less time than it took me to figure out what to type here!). A bit more time should give you the results you want. As XO stated, the casual onlooker won't even notice. It all comes down to how much effort you want to put in and how perfect you need it to be.

Brad

Very nice work Brad!

Guess I was wrong... You can get a nice look without spending all day working on this.

herion

Sky!!
Brad,

I'm working on your technique -- thanks! My first few attempts don't look as good as yours, but I'm sure that I get it down - I need to play with the threshold settings in the color range, etc.