Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers Tutorials
Techniques / Replacing a Sky pt. 1
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers / Techniques / Replacing a Sky pt. 1)
There are often times when you see a great subject with a terrible background, or a great background with no subject. Such images cry out to be composited together. One thing you need to be very cautious about is to make certain that the lighting comes from the same direction. Also ensure that the conditions, like balance direction of light source, focal length, et cetera, must be similar enough to be believable. You don't want to create a composite that looks fake, or that looks as though you live on a planet with two or more suns. You may want a sky with more interest than what's in your original, but it needs to be believable unless you're just creating far-out photo non-realistic images. I'm going to focus on how to replace a sky in this movie. With the same principles applied to removing any background the first step is to make a good selection of the sky or background that you want to remove. Use any of the Selection techniques I've covered in earlier movies, or if none of them work easily consider making a selection using Channels. I'm going to show you how to do that right now. First begin by clicking on the Channels Palette and then click on each one individually to see which one offers the most contrast between the area that you want to select and the rest of the image. In this case, that's the Blue Channel. Duplicate that Channel by clicking on it and dragging it down to the New Channel Icon. Now you have a copy of your Channel. With it selected, come up to Image, Adjustments, Levels. This is one of the few times that you'll need to access Levels here. The reason is that you can't make an Adjustment Layer to make an adjustment to a Channel. You have to adjust the Channel directly. Aggressively move the Sliders to convert your image into a black and white image. I want the sky that I'm trying to select to be white and the rest of the image to be black. Now sometimes you can't force the entire image to black and white, as in this case. As long as you have the Transition Edge black and white that's what you're looking for here, and click OK. Then come over to your Brush Tool, click on it, make sure that your Foreground color is set to black and you can directly paint on the Channel to convert this Mask into black and white. To turn this into a Selection click on the left-most Icon in the bottom of the Channels Palette. Click back up on RGB to return the image to the RGB standard view. You now see your image with marching ants around the selection. No matter which selection process you use, unless it's a very easy, quick selection I'd recommend saving the selection that way if later you want to try a different sky you won't have to bother making the selection again, instead you can just load it. To save a selection after you've made it come up to Select, Save Selection, and I'm going to call this selection Sky and click OK. You can see in the Channels Palette it has a separate Channel now that's called Sky. That's because your selections are actually stored in Channels.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Photoshop CS4 for Photographers |
| Author: | Ellen Anon |
| SKU: | 34036 |
| ISBN: | 1-935320-74-2 |
| Release Date: | 2009-09-23 |
| Duration: | 8.5 hrs / 112 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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