New Photoshop Sky Replacement Updates, Free Skies, and New Features

Here are the latest features for Sky Replacement in Photoshop. Photoshop introduced its Sky Replacement in October 2020 and Updated it in August 2021(v22.5). Learn how to elevate your photos in just a few clicks. Download new sky collections for free from Adobe. Photoshop Sky Replacement is very powerful and easy to use.

Photoshop Sky Replacement

In this video, let’s take a look at a few new features in Photoshop’s new Sky replacement update. So to get to your sky replacement, come up here to edit and sky replacement. So once you’ve brought up the sky replacement window, Photoshop is probably going to default to the last sky you selected.

So when you click this arrow right here, you see these are the skies that come with Photoshop and they’re in what you call sky groups. So you have blue skies, spectacular, sunsets. These all come with Photoshop.

Adding Multiple Skies at Once to Groups

So now one of the new features is you can create your own sky group here and import your own skies and import multiple skies, not just one. So to keep things organized, you should create your own sky group to fit your specific purpose. You can also create groups within groups. But down here, there’s a plus and you can import skys from images.

It would be your own skies, your own collection come up here to import skies from images. So first, I’m going to create my group. And you can use the icon down here to create a new sky group or come up here to this wheel and say, create new sky group.

And now I’ll name the group, Red Rock Skies, and then highlight that group, And I’m going to come up here and say import skies from images and highlight all these sky images and say open. And here’s the group I just created in all the skies that I imported from my own images.

Of course, I can rename this group if I want to. I have the new group selected that I just imported.

Export and Import Sky Presets

Now I can export selected skies if I want to share these skys with another computer. This is what I need to do. So export selected skies I’ll named that. So I am creating a dot sky file, which is a preset. So now I’m going to delete my previously created group. I’m going to delete it there and come up here to my gear.

Says imports skys from Sky Presets. So here’s the preset I created when I initially exported it. Just highlight that and say open. Here is the sky preset that I had made earlier. And I just imported back in. And there it is.

How to Import Free Skys

Another new feature is you come up here to this gear and you come down to get more skies. And this is going to take you to a webpage. And if you’re logged into Adobe Creative Cloud, you will see this webpage.

It says, Pick your perfect sky with Adobe, Photoshop. And you can scroll down and you can see the free skies that are available from Adobe. Sunsets, spectacular, night skies, blue skies, storms. I’m going to download storms and that will put it on your computer.

So on your computer, you’ll just look where your downloads go. And this is the storms pack. It’s a sky preset from Adobe as a .sky extension. And you can come up here to this gear, and where it says, imports skys from Sky Presets.

I’m going to select my storms pack and say open. And here it is. I can rename this if I want, but here are the storms sky presets that we just downloaded and imported. If you’re getting value out of this so far, hit that like button and consider subscribing.

So when choosing your skies, it’s really up to you. If you want to make it realistic or you want to make it futuristic. It’s up to you. It’s going to be how your eye is going to want to see this image.

Example of Using Sky Replacement

So for an example here, this image, it’s at sunset. The sun has gone behind the clouds in below these mountains over here. It’s getting really late in the afternoon. I can come to my sky replacement and this sky replacement kind of goes with it because the sun is coming up from beneath the clouds and looking like it’s fitting

in quite well. So that’s just an example of how you would choose something that’s pretty close to being realistic. Now, this example, I bring up my sky replacement. And earlier, I had downloaded these storms packed from Adobe. You know, I’m going to try this one right here.

Now, this sky could work with this image, because if you live in the desert, you know that you could see rain falling off in the distance. And while where you are standing, it’s sun coming down so we can make this work. Here at the top

we have our move tool. You can move your sky around any position that you want to fit in. You have this brush up here where you can extend or reduce the sky area. You have your hand to want to zoom in and pan around.

And of course, you have your magnifying glass. We had this shift edge fade edge up here. I think it’s good to go to extremes to see what your controls here do, can shift the edge a little bit, can fade it.

You see how that looks. Fade the edge a little bit at the bottom. So the sky adjustments. So you can match to the foreground again. Want to do brighter sky, darker sky. You can make it cooler, warmer, and you could scale the sky or you could make it bigger or smaller bring those clouds closer, or you could scale them

back a little bit, can flip to clouds depending on the the light direction and foreground adjustments you have to lighting modes multiply for darkening and screen for lightning. It helps blend the foreground in more with the sky. You can see how that looks.

I think I want it on multiply. And then you have lighting adjustments for your foreground. Make a little bit darker. I do want to make it on the dark side over here. And you also have color adjustments. And again, you just kind of see what it’ll do for you as far as blending in.

What I really wanted to show you here is the output. You have two choices, duplicate layer, which will put all these adjustments on one layer. But new layers, if I say, OK, this is what you’re going to get. You have a group with all of the adjustments that you changed on your sky replacement panel.

So you can turn these on and off. You can see what how it works. Here’s the foreground lighting, foreground color. There’s the sky itself. Sky temperature, sky brightness. So you can go back in and make adjustments. These are layer masks by click, for instance, on the sky brightness.

It’s use a brightness and contrast adjustment layer and you can make any adjustments that you want here. Sky temperature, it is used color balance, adjustment layer. So you can come in here, make more adjustments. Fine, tune it. And of course, you have the layer mask for the sky.

If I disable the layer mask, that’s foreground lighting right there and down here or foreground color, it’s used a curves adjustment layer. So you can go back in and fine tune some of these adjustments. So here is our before and here’s the after sky replacement in here are all the adjustments in the layers panel that we made

in the sky replacement panel. If you want to know more about Photoshop, click or tap on one of the videos on the screen. Now, if you haven’t already, subscribe like and share this video. And remember, it’s never too late to learn.

Thanks for watching. See you in the next video.

See my photography website here ▶️ https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com

Read the previous blog post there ▶️ How to Remove Color Cast and Match Color in Photoshop – Make Better Composites 2021