Replace sky and add clouds in photoshop tutorial

  

Credit by : photoshopCAFE

2 Rules of Sky Replacement in Photoshop Today I'm going to show you how to do a sky replacement. We're going to learn how to drop clouds into this clear sky. Hey, I'm Colin Smith from PhotoshopCAFE and welcome, Cafe crew, to this week's tutorial. So one of the things I find is living in Southern California, a lot of the time when I take photos, there's no clouds. Now, you might think that's a great thing, but a plain sky like this can be really boring. Now I grabbed this from Adobe stock. This wasn't shot in California that I'm aware of, but what I want to do is show you howto add some clouds, so we're going to have another photograph here with some clouds and we're going to drop it in in a realistic fashion. All right, so there's a couple of things to bear in mind. One of the things we got to think about is light direction and the other thing we're-going to think about is atmospheric perspective. And those are the things that are going to make a difference between a very believable,realistic cloud replacement and a very fake one. So let's jump in. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to cut out the sky. So we're just going to grab the Quick Select Tool right now. This is one way of doing it and just drag it across and it's actually quite easy todo it that way. Another way that you could do it is with Color range is another option. So what I want to do is not select the sky but select everything else. So the way we can do that is hit Command Shift I, that will be Ctrl Shift I on Windows orjust go to Select Inverse. We'll do exactly the same thing, so we're going to go down here, and what we've donenow is we've selected our foreground. Now I want to move this to a new layer, so notice what we've got there. What we got there is a background, so if I hit Ctrl J, Command J on the Mac, notice nowthat we also get that copied to a new layer, so we can see that there. Now one of the things you got to bear in mind, talk about atmospheric perspective. When you look at here, notice how dark it is there versus lighter at the bottom. A lot of people forget to do that and the sky replacement looks fake. All right, so let's grab our clouds. Now you can get clouds from wherever you want. I always carry a camera around with me, just shoot with an iPhone or whatever, or if Isee some really amazing clouds, I pull out my DSLR and just shoot a ton of them, and then, I just save them in my library under Clouds, and just give them that keyword, so when you need them, you can find them. So we're going to combine these images. So we'll just click and hold, move up to this tab, and then, hold it, and notice the other window is now open. I'm still holding. I'm moving my cursor down, and, now, I'll release, and it will copy it on there. So notice how we were able to copy that to a new document. All right, so now we can see we've got three layers here. We've got our clouds, we've got our mountains, see that, and then our original image, which I'll just leave on, but we don't really need it right now. All right, so what I want to do is put the clouds behind our mountain there. So we're just going to click and drag in-between the two and notice that little line will appear,and then, drop it in. All right, excellent. Okay, so remember I told you two things we got to do, we got to look at light direction and we've got to look at atmospheric perspective. Okay, so light direction is basically is the light coming straight down from the left orto the right?The key to this is shadows. If we look at these shadows, notice these shadows are all falling, notice that, on the edges here. So we got to figure out, okay, where are these shadows going?Are they going from the left or to the right?So if we start to look over here, notice these shadows are on the left. You can see it in the trees and stuff as well. We can look in the ground, we can see the shadows are on the left, that means the lightis coming from the right, which means these clouds here, the brightest part being on the right, is correct. If it wasn't, you would hit Ctrl T, right click, and then, just flip horizontal like that, and then, make the light come from the other direction. But I'm not going to do that because it's correct. So the last thing we need to do is add a little bit of atmospheric perspective. All right, so I'm going to show you how to do that. What we're going to do is we're going to create a new layer, but before I do this, I just want to do a really quick shout out. Please forgive me but I have a ton of people that said to me they're following my tutorials all the time, so please do me a favor, hit that Subscribe button because maybe you think you're a subscriber and you haven't got around to it yet, I really appreciate that. Thanks, guys. All right, so moving along, so what we're going to do is we're going to make sure thatwe hit the D key, and then, the X key, or you can just click there and choose whites our foreground color. So we want white as our foreground color. We're going to grab the Gradient Tool. Then we're going to go up to the Gradient, we're going to choose the second option, whichis Foreground to Transparent. Make sure the transparency button is turned on. Then we want to make sure this first option is on, which is linear, and we're in Norma land 100%. So what we're going to do now is we're just going to add a little bit of white gradient,so we're going to start way beneath. Let me show you what happens. First, if I click and I drag, notice that creates that gradient right there, so underneath this, it's going to be solid, to the top of it, it's going to be transparent, so that-gradient is going to go depending on if I go a long way like that, it's going to bea gradual. If I go short like that, it's going to be very immediate. So what we're going to do is we're going to start way down here because we don't want-this to be too heavy. I'm going to hold down shift and notice that constrains it to a vertical line and I'm going-to pull it up a little bit to about there, and notice what we're doing. We're just adding a little bit in the bottom there to add the atmospheric perspective. Now, because we created this gradient before, we can actually dial this up or dial it down,simply by making sure that layer is selected. With the Move Tool, hold down the Shift key and if we pull up, notice we increased our-atmospheric perspective all the way to that line, or if we pull down, we decrease it. So we can actually just dial our own gradient, from what's like pulling up the blinds, soI'm going to pull it up to about there to get a little bit of haze going in the distance there, and this produces a much more realistic result. So, anyway, I hope you enjoyed this sky replacement tutorial. If you did, hit the subscribe button, become part of the Cafe crew. Hit the Like button to let people know you liked it and join in the discussion. Add a comment. Let's get a conversation going. So thanks, guys, thanks for watching and until next week, I'll see you at the Cafe.