Replace Skies using Blend If in Photoshop

hello blink Ruud is here with f/64 Academy today I'm going to show you one of the coolest magic tricks in Photoshop and that is how you can apply a sky to an image that really needs one like this one so here's the first round we went ahead and did this and then we magically added another sky on top of that because I wasn't quite sure about this one and made this let's jump into Photoshop got a lot of cool stuff to show you so what I'm going to do in this tutorial show you how to replace the sky with blend if now blend dip is really powerful it's a really very powerful tool if you ever seen the video five ways blend def will blow your mind when the ones that get on YouTube this is the sixth way that blend if will blow your mind because you can use it to replace the sky almost immediately so here's a gorgeous shot this is in Yosemite Valley on the left hand side we've got El Cap here and right here we got Half Dome and Sentinel dome and then here we got the three brothers and we got bridal veil falls and then over here we got the Leaning Tower all these things just right there in one beautiful shot overlooking these trees so it's an iconic shot but it's not so iconic on a Monday morning with no clouds and a pure white sky I mean I'm not even talking about any blue this is just pure white nastiness so what do you do well this is where you can do a good sky dropping so take a look at this photo and see that there's really no light coming in from any direction here so we don't have any harsh light being cast anywhere so we really have to worry about that too much we can almost put any sky in here that we want but we want to be careful what kind of sky we put in there so I've got a couple of skies here that we took while we are at Yosemite National Park and these were from our deck off the condo I'm going to use this one here if you don't have skies for your stock that's fine you can download these right here on YouTube you can click this link and you can download these guys and use them in your own images or if you're an f/64 can we just click the link above and that will take you to the skies that you can grab so let me go ahead and double click this guy right here but before I do that let's talk about skies what kind of skies do you want to put in there well you typically want to match your focal length so this is a 22 millimeter focal length shot the scene that we're looking at is about a 35 millimeter there roughly close to one another there so close in millimeters that it's okay what you'd want to shy away from is a 200 millimeter shot with 16 millimeter clouds or vice versa because it won't look realistic so try to stay as close as you can with the millimeter of the focal length of the the image that you want to put in there so we'll go ahead and double-click this cloud and if you notice that when I take clouds for stock I don't shoot for the foreground I shoot for the cloud so you might have some foreground here that's okay that's okay I'm going to show you how we deal with that as we progress you don't have to just get the pictures of the the clouds because really you do want this horizon in here because sometimes your image might have a horizon right here and these clouds will match up perfectly if you were to point your camera straight up at the clouds they aren't going to match so you want your horizons to match you kind of want your focal length to match and you want your light direction to match also this would be a good photo to use for this so I'm gonna do is I'm just going to increase my exposure a little bit maybe drop the contrast maybe drop the highlights to get some structure back in those clouds and that looks about good right there and I'll press open image so it's going to open me up here in Photoshop from Adobe camera roll and you'll notice that I have two windows here what I want you to do if you want to edit like this is go to edit and then go to preferences and in preferences go to workspace in the workspace it will default as open documents as tabs and enable floating window docking I undo both of those because they're really annoying opening up as tabs will open all your images up here along the top of Photoshop and then it's hard to switch between the images the same thing is true with this enable floating window docking as we move these around they would dock up to the top of Photoshop and that is really annoying also so from a compositor standpoint you want your images to be free-floating like this and just kind of floating all over the place so I'm going to move this image over to this one I'm going to press the V for the move tool and then just click anywhere on it press and hold shift and move it over to align it right from the center and I can go ahead and close this one out now I don't need this now these are very large files I'm talking Sony a7r 240 two point four megapixel files so if you download these and you drag them and drop them on to let's say your 24 megapixel image it's not going to look right so what we need to do we need to press command or control T and then command or ctrl 0 and what that will do is it will show us the big picture it'll show us all the stuff that's happening and you see like my arms are going outside the window right now this image is so big that it's outside our normal image here so we need to make it smaller if you press shift and alt while you're in this mode that will allow you to change the image size but keep the aspect ratio the same and keep it locked in the center of your photo so we'll just move this up until we get right to the edges of my image and there we go so you'll probably have to shrink that in if you have a 24 megapixel camera to shrink this 42 megapixels in quite small so I gave you high-res files to use as the cloud stock so what I'm going to do is I'm going to just make sure that both them are on there okay we got this layer right on top of that one I'm going to change the blending mode of the clouds to difference and when I change that to difference it looks really wonky but notice what's happening right now I actually see the treetops of the cloud image right there and I can see where the clouds are going to rest when I move them and place them right on top of my image I think I like that compositionally I like the way that's going to look so now I'm going to go ahead and change that blending mode from difference back to normal and then we are going to start our blending process from here you could try make a selection of this and make a mask and do all this crazy stuff but I'm telling you this blend of thing is cool so you can either right click here and go to blending options or we can double click anywhere where it says layer 1 and that's going to take us into our layer styles so what this is is a blend if I've showed many tutorials on blend if before but it's repetition is the key here so what is blend if well blend if is nothing more than protection measures it's basically saying okay you have this layer selected here and then your underlying layers anything that's happening underneath it so what do we need to do well the everything underneath this that we want to place these clouds into are our highlights so if I were to move this over and that's wrong because now I've just applied my clouds to my foreground granite rock structures and I don't want that so I'll move that back over and then I'll do this I showed you that on purpose because with these blending options sometimes it takes a bit of experimentation don't you don't beat yourself up if you can't get it just right okay so to move this over until this top mountain range back here gets visible and doesn't have any little goobers kind of applied to it from the blending mode and then I'll press alt or option to split this and feather it that just feathers everything nice and neatly in so that when we look at this if we were to zoom in here without the feather we get these really pixelated kind of edges but with the feather if we press that alter option and feather it we get a nice smooth transition alright so you want that smooth transition definitely want that smooth transition and that looks about good right there so let's take a look at these treetops over here and see how they're done these treetops actually do have some definition to them so now we need to say is okay the top layer how are you applying yourself to this bottom layer exactly and we can look at our blending options for that top layer and it's not going to really work in the shadow areas but let's look at the highlight areas so notice I actually start to recover some of the stuff that's happening in this tree right here when I move this down to the left I'm saying this layer this top layer I want you to taper off some of your highlights a little bit to let whatever is underneath kind of show through and we'll press alt or option and split and feather that in so that now that actually gets some definition to our treetops there and we can move that over a little bit more and that looks good and we'll press ok so now we'll go ahead and press ctrl + spacebar and that will get us onto the magnifying glass and press fit on screen right click fit on screen so now we've got our clouds on top of our image and everything looks pretty good so far it's almost it's almost right there actually it looks pretty good let's go ahead and move this around press V to move and move this so you'll see as we move it it's still affecting the image everywhere that it would because those blending options are already stuck there so we didn't actually make a mask there is no masking that has been done here okay so move that right to about there and that looks good but we need to know we need to know what's happening because if we turn this on and off look at the treetops are getting affected some of the stuff back here is getting affected so how do we know what to actually mask well let's create a mask to begin with just make that mask icon there and above that I'm going to make a new layer and that new layer is going to be a solid color fill layer with the solid color fill layer I highly suggest you make this a very stark magenta because magenta really does pop off the page more so than any other color in the color spectrum II there's but either magenta or cyan but because skies do tend to have cyan I'm will just make it magenta and press okay so now we need to do is make a clipping mask and a clipping mask is basically just saying hey you this magenta layer I want you to only affect what's directly below you so I want you to fit in there so press alt or option and click right between those two layers and that will create a clipping mask another thing you do is right click and say create clipping mask so now we actually get to see in magenta where this image our cloud image is affecting the rest of our photograph and on the mask of the clouds just click that mask we have a brush we can press B for our brush tool D to default us to black and white and then we need to switch over to black so press X to get us to black hotkeys are incredible memorize these hotkeys so I'm going to press the right bracket to make my brush a little bit larger and with the brush tool I'm using a Wacom tablet so I'm going to click these right here this is going to make everything that I do very pressure-sensitive that will control the flow I'll also control the opacity of my brush so I'll push that down and just go over all these little magenta goobers that kind of came into place here so just kind of go over all that stuff okay okay and then I'm going to also go down here over these trees it looks good and then I'm also going to zoom in again ctrl + spacebar to get the magnifying glass and move in now we're back on the brush so I'm gonna make my brush size a little bit smaller and I'm going to keep masking and this is where everything gets really awkward because I have to talk about something other than this so that we can kind of just you know you can watch me but we can still talk about something so interesting fact I meant to do this tutorial a long time ago but I ran into a bunch of issues so the night before was the last night I was about to do this tutorial and I lost power because we've been having some crazy thunderstorms here in Kansas City and I didn't have the ability to do it then so I'm gonna go and do it now and then I'm going to keep brushing away keep brushing away keep brushing away and get all this magenta goober e stuff off of here so we don't see it anymore because what's happening is those blending options that we chose are still affecting our image because the underlying area has some highlight areas that look like the highlights that you would see in the sky but are actually happening in our foreground and that's that's good enough we don't have to get too far into there so press ctrl + spacebar get back to fit on screen and now we can actually we can just delete this magenta layer just press delete everything looks really good so far but we may need to do this we need to go into our opacity and drop the opacity down a little bit just to make it blend a little bit better and if you notice back here what's happening back here there's a looks like this is really fading into the sky but right now our sky is too close to it so I'm also going to do is I'm going to click on that mask again and with my brush tool this is where you can do some free blending ok I'm going to make my brush really big by using that right bracket key and make sure that the feather is set to a hardness of 0 and I'm going to change that flow back to a hundred percent over here and what I want to do is I'm just going to pop just kind of hit that right back there not right here because that's going to make a big mask over my whole sky but I'm using that very soft edge that feathered edge of my brush to just make that smooth transition happen a little bit more smoothly on that range back there and that looks great so let's say you do all this work and you really like what's happened here but you want to move it you want to move the whole thing well if you were to move this notice what happens to our mask here if we move this layer it's not just moving our layer it's also moving our mask so if you look down here as we do that if we move this around you can see how that layer is affecting other things that's because our our mask is moving along with it so what we need to do is there's a little chain link here undo that chain link and now you can move this anywhere and all of our masking will stay the same and so while brending blending principles to allow us to move this wherever we want so let's say another thing another hypothetical you do all this work with this guy and you're like man this guy just doesn't do it for me what am I going to do well open up another sky let's take this one for example we'll open up the sky and for the sake of the tutorial we'll just press Auto just Auto do that and maybe maybe increase the warmth a little bit and just press open image so now that's going to open us up here in Photoshop and we can do the same thing just drag-and-drop this by pressing V press and hold shift and drag it over to our layer so now we have this guy let's do the same thing change this to difference and get it to match kind of roughly where we want as far as our composition to go I kind of like it right there let's try that four four on four sides and we'll go to normal and now I can do the same thing I did with that magenta layer and press alt or option and clip this right in and now I have this sky with all the settings of what's going on down below and now we have a really realistic changed sky very realistic replaced sky almost to the point that nobody would really know and so why does it look much better well we actually have some definition now in that sky instead of it being a blanket of a white sky we have some definition there and from here I would edit further I would maybe flatten this add some curves add some hue/saturation maybe run my zone systems and just play around and have some fun and just to show you another example of this from the exact same scene but we're zoomed in a little bit here here same thing another sky replacement using the exact same technique here's a sky replacement for this one so what do we do well we did a whole lot of things the first thing we did was we found a good sky a sky that matches the light relatively well and it also has a roughly the same focal length we then grab that sky edited it really quickly to make it look like what it would look like if it was in the scene that we had photographed we dragged it and dropped it right onto our photo use the difference blending option to put our sky exactly where we wanted to on that background and then we use our blending options we use those underlying layers and top layer blending options to really smoothly apply this cloud scene right to our image we then cleaned up that mask using a clipping mask with that magenta layer that is completely optional you don't have to do that but it really makes it easy to see exactly what you need to mask out after that we showed how you can move the layer by unlinking the mask so that you could freely move that there and still keep the mask available and then we also showed how to drop another sky in if maybe the sky that you chose wasn't quite right where you want it to be so again my name is Blake Curtis with f/64 Academy if you liked it please give me those thumbs up share it comment on it tell a friend especially a friend who's got a great photo but their sky sucks you could say hey um you might want to be your photos good but check this out check this out so pretty cool tutorial also subscribe subscribing is really important because these video tutorials come out quite often I'm really rocking it over here at f/64 academy subscribe 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Channel: f64 Academy

Views: 71,507

Keywords: Blend If, Blake Rudis, Photoshop, Replace Sky, Replace clouds

Id: HWzIfdh6muA

Length: 16min 20sec (980 seconds)

Published: Fri May 27 2016