Sky Replacement in Photoshop 2021 – New Feature

Learn how to replace skies in Photoshop 2021. Sky Replacement in Photoshop 2021 is easy with many controls to fine-tune the sky and the foreground.

Hello everybody, my name is Charles. In today’s video, I’m gonna show you one of the highlight features, in Photoshop 2021. It’s the sky replacement feature. So have you ever been out with your camera, and you see a beautiful landscape, take your photo? Nice blue sky, beautiful colors. You get it home, make your adjustments, and you’re thinking, “I wish that sky had some beautiful white clouds in it.” Well Photoshop has got a built in sky replacement, come up here to Edit. Sky Replacement. So you can go through all these presets. And decide which ones you like, every time you click on it it will take effect right away. It’ll do its cutout, and replace your sky, and make adjustments, because Photoshop knows the difference between the foreground and the sky. And it will make minor adjustments, not really strong adjustments, just enough to try and balance.

But here are the presets you have. You have blue skies, spectaculars skies, sunsets, and as you put your mouse over any of these resets, you’ll see the file name and the size is displayed as a tool tip. Notice up here, this top bar, these are your favorites, or most recently used.

Add Your Own Skys For Sky Replacement in Photoshop

You can also use your own skies. So if you fly out this menu, these are all your options that you can do with the sky. So if I say New Sky Group, I can call this group My Skies. Say OK. And you have a folder down here, and I can use this little plus down here to create a new sky, goes to my file system. Select that one, open it up, it’ll give me a chance to name the file, I can name the sky, something different from the file name, I’ll name it Red Rock Sky1, say OK. Since that’s selected, it took effect. So you can bring in your own skies.

One thing I want you to notice is that Photoshop has built-in artificial intelligence that knows what the difference is between the sky and the foreground, so if I click on this preview right here, and then bring the sky in, you could see that some of the colors have changed. And in some cases you’re gonna see this a little bit more obvious than others, but that’s just to let you know that that’s Photoshop working in the background making that change. But all your presets here, including the one I just created, you can move these around, you can delete them, rename them, reorder the skies in any of these groups. So you have that control over your presets.

Sky Replacement Options for Sky Replacement in Photoshop

So you had the Move tool here which you can move your sky around, position it, so you get the clouds where you want it. You have your zoom tool here. You can zoom in to see your edges. Have Photoshop cut out your foreground from your background. And of course you have your hand tool. You can see your edges. So this option Shift edge determines where this border is between the edge of your foreground and the edge of the sky. So if I shift this way over, you could see that edge change. Fade Edge, which sets the amount of fading or feathering from the sky image to the original photo along the edges, so, I change to fade edge. You can see a little bit of change there. So these are just things that you would fine tune. I’m sure there’s a lotta cases where the sky replacement gets this right.

But I zoom back out. You have control over the sky brightness. Make it brighter, darker. You have temperature here, you can make the sky cooler. Make it warmer. You could scale the sky. So I made it smaller right there, and I can use my move tool, but it’s way too small. And you can make it a lot bigger, so that’s scaling the sky and move it back down to somewhere in the middle. And you also have foreground adjustments. So if I need to change the lighting mode, and the foreground, you can see it made it a little bit lighter there. As I showed you before in the preview if I un-click that you see that there’s a lotta saturation. So once I bring in this sky, it took a little of the color out, I have this color adjustment right here. If I want to, say, adjust it back, and I can change the lighting on the foreground, make it a little bit darker, make it brighter. The reason for these is you may want to change foreground adjustments or even sky adjustments to your liking, you may not agree with what Photoshop chooses, but you have all these options here. And this flip option right here, that will help if maybe you put in a sky and the lighting is coming from a different direction. You just click that and it flips the clouds. And with this brush here, you can extend or reduce the sky area.

And then when I put it on new layers, say OK, Photoshop has created layers on all the things that I actually adjusted. So you see up here, I changed the sky temperature. Here’s the mask of what is behind the replacement Another mask of the foreground layer. And another mask for the color. This is a levels adjustment. If you can go back in and change any of these mass. If you’re getting value out of this so far, hit that like button

Sunset Example of Sky Replacement In Photoshop

Here’s another landscape example. This one is a sunset, but, unfortunately there’s no clouds, so, as you know, the sun would probably be shining upwards into the sky and you would get some kind of light that was reflecting underneath the clouds. Well let’s see what Photoshop has here. Going to Edit Sky Replacement. And by default, as soon as you bring that up, it will use the first sky that is shown. So that’s why you see that take effect like that.

So if I use the sunset group, and look for something, I would expect, this would be really good. And that’s kinda what I’ve seen in that area before, where you have the sun that’s gone down, and it is shooting the light up and reflecting on the bottom of the clouds, or something like this. And I can use my move tool, to move this around. Or I can go into Spectacular, let me try this cloud. Okay, I like that better. And if I wanna try and make any color changes to the foreground, try and match it a little bit differently than Photoshop tried to. And let me change the lighting just a little bit. But now that I’ve selected my sky and made my adjustments, I can output two new layers. And there’s the adjustments that I can go back to and change. So that’s a sunset.

City Example of Sky Replacement In Photoshop

And here’s another example of more in the city. So it applied the last one that I had actually used. I’m gonna click on this one as an example. And this may not be the right one for this image, but I just wanted to show you that if I wanted to flip the clouds, mainly because the light in this image is coming from the right. And so when I flip the clouds it kinda looks that way too, but, I wouldn’t use this image. And again, you can choose something that changes the mood of your image. You could scale it up if you need to. And something like that, try different things, flip the sky, just to see if you like it better. I’ll flip that back. And if you don’t want to go back, and adjust the layers that Photoshop creates, you can use the duplicate layer output. And that just puts everything, all the changes onto one layer, you don’t see all the layers. Something like this. So we just put all those layers together. And you can always delete any of the background layers, and go back in and start again. Pretty cool, huh? If you want to know more about Photoshop, click on this playlist here. If you haven’t already, subscribe and like this video. And remember, it’s never too late to learn. Thanks for watching. See you in the next video.

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

Check out the previous blog article https://charlescabrera.com/how-to-manipulate-with-puppet-warp-in-photoshop/