Have you ever taken a great photograph, only to realize that the sky was so blown out it was virtually unusable?
Here’s a trick I learned in PhotoShop to replace a blown-out sky. It uses a feature in the blending options palette I’d never even noticed before.
Image may be NSFW.
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Step 1: Here’s my image. I snapped it on the side of the road. I really take awful photos like this. As you can see, the sky is blown out and looks unrepairable.
Step 2: I found this image of a blue sky online by typing “blue sky” into Google. Yes, that means I stole it for this example. If I were doing this for a living, I’d take a bunch of “blue sky” photos while I was outside on different photo shoots and save them to my hard drive.
Step 3: I’ve opened both images in Photoshop, then dragged and dropped the clouds as a layer into the first image. Notice the clouds only cover the area where the sky will be – I don’t want them replacing the white on the sign or in the pavement on the right.
Step 4: Here’s the cool stuff: on the very bottom of your layers pallet there is a little fx icon that adds a layer style. Click it, then click the “Blending Options…” option at the top of the list. This will open the Layer Style window.
At the bottom of the Layer Style window are 2 blending sliders. Click and drag the black triangle on the “Underlying Layer” slider all the way to the right. You will see your sky image replace all the pixels beneath it that are darker than white.
Now hold down the “alt” key and drag the black triangle to the left. It will split in half. You can use this to fine-tune the blending. You can also try using the opacity sliders to get a nice effect around the edges of objects (tree leaves are hard!)
Step 5: Here’s the final product. I used the eraser tool to remove the power poles in the background and to clean up some halo problems I had on the edges of tree leaves. Then I moved the cloud layer around until I had a real cloud in the background.
That’s it. The next time you have a nice photo with a blown-out sky, see if this trick will work for you.