INSANELY Easy Photoshop Sky Replacement - Give Every Photo The Stunning Sky It Deserves! | Hayley Kelsing | Skillshare

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teacher avatar Hayley Kelsing, Hotel & Food Photographer

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

5 Lessons (26m)
    • 1. Intro to Sky Replacements

    • 2. Small Lightroom Edits

    • 3. Replacing The Sky

    • 4. Before & After

    • 5. Closing Message

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About This Class

Let me show you how to take a boring, uninspiring image to the next level with this SUPER QUICK & EASY sky replacement. All you need is your photo and access to Adobe Photoshop. Yiipeeee!


Meet Your Teacher

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Hayley Kelsing

Hotel & Food Photographer


Hello, I'm Hayley! A 29 year old full-time Digital Nomad, Social Media Manager and Photographer. I spend my days bouncing all over the globe working with international clients on both Social Media and Photography; primarily those in the hospitality industry.

Some days I'll be shooting a hotel chains new a la carte menu. Some days I'll be designing and implementing highly targeted Facebook Ads for a new restaurant opening. Some days I'll be doing neither, eating from a jar of pickled onions on the sofa watching Luther. 

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1. Intro to Sky Replacements: guys Hayley here. And I am so excited to teach you today's lesson on how to replace a sky in front of shop. Now there are so many ways that you can do this. I'm sure you've probably even had a look yourself. And there's a 1,000,000 different YouTube tutorials and guides on how to replace this guy and finish up. And I have tried to roll, and I'm here to tell you this is the best way. This is the easiest way and the best results you're going to get with any sky replacement. So when I first started getting into photography, I would often see in a lot of photos, you know, that just had the most amazing sunsets. Amazing sunrises. Ah, now we think wow, like this person got really lucky with weather. No, of course they didn't. They just mastered how to replace a sky. And that's pretty much what I'm gonna teach you today. In the easiest, most effective way that I've learned on, I'm going to show you how you can take your photos to the next level sky. Replacing is something that a lot of photographers do in particular of your working with models outside or architectural photography where you're shooting, let's say a property on the impact it can have on your final image is huge. So ever since I've learned this method, I find that I am so much more confident. Now if I'm on set, let's say I'm shooting. Ah, hotel on the weather isn't perfect. Previously, I would have freaked out and had a moment and thought, Oh, my God, I'm never gonna be able to get this the photo that the client wants. Since learning this method, I no longer have that worry because I know that in just a couple of minutes on foot a shop I can change the image into the ideal image that I know that the client is after. I can swap out that dull, rainy sky and easily put in an incredible sunset or a sunrise or, you know, Twilight Hour, whatever it is that you want. So what you're gonna need is funny shop and the image that you'd like to change this guy. So if you have that in another way of doing this, don't worry, because I know there are many, many, many, many ways that you can change this kind for the shop. This is just the way that I've learned. Andi, I'm pretty sure you're gonna agree with me. Once you've taken this course, This is by far the easiest and most effective way to get your photos to really pop by easily putting in an amazing new sky. 2. Small Lightroom Edits: Okay, So first things first is obviously we want to find the image that we want to edit. So I've just opened up. Here are photos I took last year in Copenhagen, which it's a photo that I find quite dull and bland. What I can see that it's got potential. Um, as it stands, there's really nothing that really grabs your attention about this image, which is why it's gonna work so well for a sky replacement. So what I wanted to do just before I go ahead, Andi, uh, pop over into Photoshopped to put in my sky I really wanted to just make sure that I was ah , using the best of this image that I could. So I'm just gonna make a few really quick edits in light room just to really make the image as it stands as it is, Aziz best as it can be. So, of course, this this lesson isn't really about light room, so I'm not really going to go into too much depth about what I'm doing about what I'm doing to this images. This is the interface for light room. You've got your presets that will come in on your left. We're not gonna do any presets for this image. We're gonna draw the door manually here and then on the right hand side is where we've actually got all of our little sliders that we can change everything that we wish about the photo. So to go through them very quickly first things first is I'm gonna tackle my highlights and shadows. Obviously, the sky here is already quite blow. Now is anything that I'm about to do is really just going to affect this area. So let's pull out. Highlights down on Let's pull us shallows up. So by polling shows up, we're going to get much more of a dynamic range. It's gonna pull out all the shadows, all the dark areas, for example, If we just look down here, we pull a shadows down. We lose so much detail a soon as we pull them up, it comes alive straightaway. So usually I do this for for 99% of my photos highlights down and shadows up whites. I tend not to pay too much with. You can see if I just slide that there. What difference is making? I'm gonna leave it. Zero um, not to bother to change that. And then blacks, uh, you slide it down, We're gonna go from or contrast. Look, and we slide up. It does similar toe. What are shadows Does support all the blacks up. I'm actually gonna have this just sitting below zero. So maybe at minus minus 20 just so we get a nice bit of contrast from image. Sorry, I need to do that manually. Can't have that saying a 19 that next What we're gonna do is looking out charity. So I'm gonna show you what happens when I call this up. I am when I pull this now. So where was he when we bring down it completely blows the image. That's not the look we're going for. We do want a little bit of charity. I'm gonna zoom in so you can see what difference that makes over there. So this is what it's there are, and this is when you pull it up. So usually I like to have it around 20 to 30 so let's have it. 28. Should be fine. Um, we're gonna leave the vibrance and saturation right now. Don't think Want to tackle that at the moment. Internal curve, This image. I'm not going to do anything. I'm gonna leave that as it is. I believe the saturation. Um, obviously, here is where you could change que eliminates as well. So if you'd like to play, for example, let's say let's say the yellows, the yellow buildings over here, you don't fault of oranges. And it let's say you want to make him a different color. Let's come over for orange in our fuse panel when we can just play with that and see how that's changed it to red. Super easy. Then it goes on like a pinky tired. Then we go back together the way so you can play around from Wiki Hughes. I'm going to leave them with zero. So the point of this lesson isn't really to teach you about how to change that kind of stuff. And even so, I'm I'm gonna put up my sharpening just a tad on. Also, my noise reduction just attacked. The reason for that is because I remember when taking this photo my oath by so must have been around around 1000 because although I have a tripod on, it was very low light when I was taking this fight. Eso exporter, Make sure I'm removing any noise from image. And then I'm just gonna kick on, enable purple corrections and remove any chromatic aberration down here. You can add vignette in that kind of something I tend to do at the end. So I wouldn't do that until I've got my sky old and they're ready to go so we can leave that for now. Let's see what else we got. You want to do anything here? Some of the violence. Um, maybe we can increase that a little bit. That several vibrance, maybe it plus 10. Um, and then I'm going to see well, explosion. So the look that I'm gonna go forward its image, we're going to do it some set, so I don't want to make it too overexposed is, And it's not gonna look natural. I do want to bring it up a little bit. Maybe just they put 15. And also, I think I would like to warm it up a little bit, The image looking quite cold to me, obviously. Time a day that I took it. So you've got the option in light room you can use your little pet thing where you could do it manually. Here. I'm just gonna manly, um, bring it up a little bit and then I think that I also need to bring off a little bit. It's a bit green, as it is, I think somewhere around then it's nice, so I could just show you the before and after, just with a few little tweaks that we've done. So it just made it stand out just a little bit more. So it's gonna be much easier for us to work with this fetish of the end product. It's gonna really pop just by making you feel a few little edits. You can. Of course, once you've done your scar replacement, you can then bring that image back over into light room on which often I'll do. I'll make my changes beforehand, put my sky in but a shop and then come back into light room and add some bits about you know that I don't think quite works or play with slide is a little bit more. But as it stands, I think this is looking really good. I'm just going to level out of it I can see that it doesn't look quite even remnants of a bit lopsided. And then I think we'll probably will get to cropping. But we're gonna do that once we've got the sky in there. So once you're happy with the image that you've got, obviously you don't need to do this before you put your sky in. This is really just to just something is part of my work flow that I really like to enter photo shop with the best that I can already. So once you've done that, click over here and we've got two ways you can do this, you can export it and then load it into Photoshopped. Well, you can just click. I believe it's control. Click down on the image on here and you can actually just click on edit in for to shop. So whatever your brother I'm for the sake of. But I'm gonna save it as a fall now and load it independently into finish up so we can do you just click export. I'm just going to shove that one to my just stop. Let's call it for the Nagin on edited version. Okay, Okay. Believable The rest the same. We don't need to do anything else with that. And then we're just gonna click export so you can see on top. Lets people just see that image exporting that. 3. Replacing The Sky: right. So once your image has successfully exported in light room, that's when we're going to move over into photo shop. So you might have a sky from a previous photo that you like to news. Or like I'm gonna be doing in this example. I'm gonna be actually using a photo that I find online. So I've already found my photo. I can show you over here. This is the photo that I've found on. That I'm gonna be using is my sky. So I found this on a website called Sunsplash, so you can have a look here. It's an amazing website. I just typed in sunset on you concede there's over 20,000 photos of different sunsets. So all you're really looking for is a sunset that you think will match with your photo quite well. On ideally look for the same orientation. So you're gonna be looking for a landscape sky. If you're gonna be putting into a landscape image photo of yours and vice versa. It can work putting a a portrait sky onto a landscape photo. But it's much easier finding one that's already in the right orientation. So I've already got my sky so we cannot we can minimize this on. We're going to head over to photo shop, so I'm looking Adobe Photoshopped CC 2014. I know it's quite old now, so you probably have a much more advanced one than I do. But I find that I'm super happy with this version of the shop. And I'm just a bit lazy to learn anything new, Really? Cause I've got quite used to the interface and the tools in this photo shop. So whatever about to do, you'll be able to do it in whatever birds from the shop, you have no doubt. So we're gonna click over into file, click open. And then here it is, I think, where we saved it and we're gonna click open. Okay, so that's the image that we've just quickly edited in library. And now what we also want to do is open our sky said to go over again the open, and there it is. Right. So what we're gonna do is we're going to do command A So what? Essentially that does is select all with this electoral of the image and then commence. See, um, I'm working on a Mac at the moment, so just have a look to see what I'm not entirely sure which controls you need for Windows. Then what? We're gonna do one. When we had back into our Copenhagen photo, we're gonna do command the and it's literally just gonna place our sky on top of our image . Okay, so now what we're going to do on what I like to do is line up the sky, the horizon with my image there just to make it an easier transition for the Tufo tested blend. So we're gonna do is we're gonna well, downshift, and we're just going to drag that out from what I'll do is I'll never the capacity so I can kind of see what I'm doing. And I'm paying attention to where this head shoulder these trees on you and where my horizon is in my image. So I'm gonna bring that down just below to run about there. But then you can get your opacity back up to 100 so you can turn that layer off. We're not gonna be using that right now. The main layer that we're gonna be using in the background just going to rename this layer , We'll just call that, uh, ever taken. And then we can just reading this one off sky. So whilst you are clicked on the Copenhagen or your base layer image, what you want to do is click over into channels and then you're gonna see RGB Red, green and Blue The important channel that Wigan's use, which is gonna be so effective at creating ask our replacement is blue So took on the blue to know And what we're gonna do is we're gonna duplicate it. So drag that down to the lay down here and you'll see that it will create a copy. We don't actually want to really fill around with the original Blue Channel. So that's why we're going to use a copy. Next thing we're going to do, um, you're going to click on on the Blue Copy Command And now what this is going to do is open up your curves. Now, if you've ever used like room or Photoshopped, you'll know the power that is in curves. And you could do so much with an image just by playing around with cursed. What we're trying to do here is separate. So we can try to separate the blacks from the whites. So down here, this is where all the blacks are gonna be, and up here is a where will the whites are gonna be? So what you can literally do is just drag. Now, if I drag it like that, you can see what that does to the image you can keep on going. So I'm gonna pull that down more. Yeah, the more black better. So really want that division between the whites on top and the black sand below. So you can try and love it more. Maybe. Yeah, he probably keep putting it down. Keep coming down on Let's try moving the white over. Who Who? So for what you can see, for the most part, we've done a really great job off separating our blacks and whites. Once you've done that, just click, OK? And you can see this such a great divide now between our blacks and are white. And that's really what we're after. And that's what's gonna make this car replacement so easy to do. So once you got that, you're gonna press command and just click on that blue copy. So what? You gonna see is these little marching ants that are going to go around on the outline of your image Once you see that, click over into layers. Now, when you're back over into layers this is when it gets exciting because you're literally gonna turn your sky on So press a little button here, you see the little I and you can see Ask I now is there obviously that's not the look. We're going for the way that we're going to turn this into a perfect sky Replacement is simply by clicking down here and we're going to add a layer mask we're gonna do take this one and the skies. She's gonna place itself in perfect selection, which we just made it always here we can see here we've got a little bit the sky which is coming through into the houses. So this is a very easy fix. What we're gonna do is we're gonna make sure was we clicked onto a layer mask and then we're gonna kick on our paintbrush over here. Now we wanna make sure we've got black and white. So black is actually going to hide all of that sky. It's come through into our image. So just to make my brush a bit smaller have your capacity at 100. I like to have not not too hard of a brush, so around 10% would be great. And then what happens when I click? It's essentially getting rid of all that sky which spilled over into our image. See very easy to get rid off. So what you can actually do? Zoom out. You can make your brush nice and big. Send the hardness off a little bit so we don't spread over into the sky and then we literally his color. Make sure that we're getting rid of any sky that bled out. You do make a mistake. For example, you'll go on, get rid of this guy. Just click back down here and switch over to your white, and you can easily just color that back in. Well, okay, but there's been to much longer. I think you get the you get the just so a woman old that is a near perfect sky replacement . So, like I said, you can go in Andi, make it as perfect as you want. Go into, you know, Zoom into 500% 1000% isn't much percent as you want and you can really perfect it. But as faras, a quick, easy sky replacement, goes, I think that looks pretty incredible for the amount of work actually that we needed to put in. So the next thing that we want to do is just to make sure that the picture looks unified so we don't want we don't want it to look like we've just plopped on a fake sky. So often Will do is I'll bring the saturate Sorry, the capacity down a little bit of this guy just because, you know it can look a little bit too fake. We've got 100% so let's bring it down, say, perhaps around their 70% Also, what you can see it immediately looks more natural around the edges to be. Look over here with the top of the houses. When we've got a dead in 100% you can kind of see the clear the French differentiation between sky on the scene. So when you bring that down, it lends so much better Do you even bring it down a little bit further Delight says say 65% . Once you've done that, the next thing that I like to do is an adjustment layer. So you got two choices. You can either adjust the images a whole, or you can adjust the scenes separately to the sky. And why I like to do is a justice seen as a whole. What we can do. Um, we can just get down here and let's go to color. Look up. So what this does is essentially it's a preloaded bunch off color filters, I suppose, is the best way to put it. That photo shop has, which makes it so easy to remake your image. Look as if the sunset matches that scene. So what we're gonna do is let's have a look at some of the ones we've got. Um, it's called crisp, warm, crisp winter. We're gonna kind of be looking for a I would say up maybe a bluey probably kind of look to match the twilight kind of, Well, that's quite nice. So let me just show you this is 100%. If I just turn that off and on, you can see the difference. Now you forget the sky. Look at these houses over here. Okay, so we turned at all. They're quite cold. It's not really a sunset hour kind of look. And when we turn that on, they get that glow about them. So I think this is a really good filter to use. What we can do is just tone it down so we don't need it at 100%. We want it kind of looking a bit more natural. So let's go with around 40 25% what you can do, just like we did over here with our sky layer mask. We can actually get rid of any of those adjustments that we don't want in our sky so we can click on our color look up layer mask, tickle the paintbrush, make it nice and big. Well, you can actually do is just just get rid of that color and you can see it's changed the color quite a bit from the sky. Another way of doing that would just be to bring your color look up but low this guy, and then it's only going to affect what is directly on top of you can see here. Are you gonna be affecting you just look at the houses around here, it's only affected that is not affecting this guy anymore. So there's two ways you can do that. It's completely up to you. Andi, I think overall, that's a really great looking photo, considering we spent all the five minutes on it, you can go in and play around with it as much as you want. For example, why would usually I would usually as mother adjustment layer down here? I'm usually a curbs layer. I find that gives it some really great contrast. Said that seeing without its night do you have it Something that down a little bit in this school, that up in the bullet we were doing okay on then I think that the last thing to do really would just be too Koppett profit down a bit. I feel like we've got a little bit too much. I'm negative space down there. The river would bring that up a little bit. Don't really want to lose any of these people. I really like the movement that they give some actually going to cough it from the left side. Obviously, this is completely to taste. And there you go. So once you've done that, just hold down command option shift E and you'll see that Well, that's gonna do is flatten that all into one layer. So you can now get rid of all these. And that is your image. That's all your sky and your scene is now merging toe one image. Now let's look at our before and after festival. This was all before NAFTA, just to the adjustments were made in light room. That should reset that That's normal. This was the original photo that we were working with. When you compare this now to the photo that we've just edited, that's head over into fun shot. The difference is huge. The difference is insane. Now this is a photo that I'm completely uninspired by. I would not be interested in showing any of my peers or family. This photo, on the other hand, is complete opposite. I would be so excited to show this round to my friends that I went on the trip with. Perhaps it was you shot this for a client. Perhaps you shot it for the tourism bureau or, you know, something like that. One of those stores down in in this waterfront. The difference in these two images is astronomical. And it to cool of, what, 23 minutes? Obviously, I went through this a little bit slower to make sure that you can. You can follow along with me. But once you start playing around with this yourself when you start doing the sky replacements yourself, you'll see you can rack out an incredible fakes guy in less than five minutes and consuming that and see that is near perfect. You would never know that That's Guy is not really but we're going to do is just gonna say that, Let's say and is it. This is as a J pic. Save is maximum. I always do. You never know if you're gonna want to print these four tires or, you know I have them on a large scale anywhere. So homage of computer your hard drive can keep up with it. Always have it as large as you can. And then, like I said, what you can do, you can actually come back into light room if you'd like. Bring that photo back in the light room and we can make final edits if you like 4. Before & After: just pop up to develop. Let's say we would like to include increased the clarity a bit more. Let's say I would like to increase the situation. Maybe, um, let's bring these first down. Let's add denies, even yet as well. And there you go. That is your final sky replacement image that I think look absolutely amazing. Especially considering took us next, No time and we were even able to sort of sky one line. 5. Closing Message: so hopefully after that you can see just how easy it is to create the most amazing sky replacement in such a short amount time. There really is no excuse to not have amazing transcripts are amazing sunrises or beautiful blue skies in your images anymore. When you can see how easy it is to get that effect, now is a perfect time for you to go and dig out all those photos that you thought with dull and uninspiring and boring. Load them into photo shop on adding some cool new skies and see the difference that it makes to your photos. You're gonna be blown away when you see that these photos that you thought have been archives and put in the trash, you're never going to use them. Now, suddenly you're able to dig them out on create whole new masterpieces Just by this one simple technique that I've just taught you, anyone that's interested in learning more about liar. Um, I know this lesson was really focused on solely on putting new skies into images and fed a shop. I will be doing more in depth tutorials or lessons on how it ended My photos in light room from beginning to end. So stick around and you'll be able to catch so soon. Thanks, son. See you guys soon.