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Make your skies come to life
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Jazz Up Your Skies:
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1.
Watch the Skies...
With Photoshop, we can critique Mother Nature herself, and improve on reality. If you're going to use an image why not make it as cool as possible? Here we're going to learn one way to alter your image's sky. Change the color; make it look like a different time of day- and most importantly, make it more eye-catching. You see a before & after example to the left. We'll get to that one later. |
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2.
Preparing the Image
I took this mountain landscape for my first example. Before I get going I'm going to get rid of that single cloud. Just what the hell is that thing doing there anyway? For what I want to do I think it would be better to have a solid sky, so in the smaller image, you see me cloning away with the rubber stamp tool  to eradicate that nasty cloud. |
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3.
Making a Good Selection
FYI, I used a combination of magic wanding & channel selection. Here's what I did: First I used the magic wand to select the sky by shift-clicking until I had it all. You can see how it looked in the image above. The edge between the mountains & sky was great, but when you zoomed in, the selection around the trees was less than acceptable (see top left.) So saved my selection, & duplicated the Blue Channel which had a nice, clear separation of the tree & sky (see middle left). I selected the trees and pasted that area into my wand selection channel (Alpha 1, at left). Now I had a great selection of the sky I could load whenever I wanted. If we're going to affect the sky, we're gonna need a good selection. There's a ton of ways to do this, and I've got several tutorials on making selections. Do whatever you feel comfortable with. |
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4.
Gradient Time
To make my first color alteration to the sky, I picked a bright yellow as my foreground color (with black for the background) & used the linear gradient tool  to make the gradient you see in the image at left. Looks pretty exotic. If I'm illustrating a sci-fi story I might be done here, but I'm going to get a little closer to realism before I'm done. |
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5.
Blending Mode
To get the look I wanted, I changed the Layer Blend Mode to Screen. Screening my gradient will lighten the color of my original sky where the yellow pixels are in the gradient layer. When black is screened, no change is made to the pixels of the underlying layer, which is why I used it in my gradient.
You can see the result in my image. Instead of late afternoon, there's now a nice blend on the horizon making it look like morning. |
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6.
Another Gradient
Of course I have to try multiple variations. After doing all that selecting work, I enjoy seeing a variety of possible outcomes. Each one is great in it's own way.
For this one, I used the red/black gradient you see in the image at left: top. When I change the mode to screen I get a cool magenta to blue gradient in my mountain image.
Let's try to understand what's happening: the Screen mode is sort of like taking a film negative of the gradient layer, laying over a film negative of the sky in the mountain image, and making a print. |
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7.
Gradient Combo
Only one more, I promise. This one is just a subtle difference from the one above. By using a combination of layers containing gradients I got a larger magenta area and a little highlight just on the horizon.
Another way to think about what's happening is mathematically. Screen is adding the value of the pixels in the gradient layers to the underlying layer. The resulting value can't be more than 255 (white). Since black has a value of zero, no change is made in the layer below. |
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8.
Jazzing Another Image
Hey! Who wants to stop now?
I took this image of a Hong Kong skyline (top left) and selected the sky. The original sky is kind of blah. All the action in that photo is in the city & water. Before we get back to the gradients and blending modes, let's see what a Hue/ Saturation adjustment can do to liven things up. With the sky selected I bumped the hue of the sky up a bit:
Already the image is a lot more exciting. |
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9.
Magenta Gradient
At top left, you can see a gradient I put in the sky area on a layer above the city image. Again, we're in sci-fi/ fantasy territory here.
I changed the blend mode on the gradient layer to Screen and got the second image you see. |
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10.
Another Gradient Combo
Pushing it a little farther, I again used a combination of gradient layers to produce my final image. Compare this with the original drab sky and what a world of difference you see after only a few minutes work.
That's it! Get to work! I don't ever want to see you produce a boring sky again! |
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If you have any questions or comments regarding this tutorial please post it in this thread
http://forum.teamphotoshop.com/showthread.php?t=24694
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