Adobe Photoshop Sky Replacement Too - some thoughts

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Julian Elliott

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Julian Elliott
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The subject of stripping in skies from one image to another is always going to cause debate. Even more so now that Adobe have released a tool within Photoshop to do just that.

But is all it's cracked up to be? I've taken a look this morning and the results are here.

I personally do NOT put in skies from other images choosing to wait for the light. You can blend two exposure taken milliseconds apart but there are some issues which you'll see here:

 
It uses a very handed one size fits all approach and results are very questionable most of the time. Worse than that people will inevitably try to force non-matching skies, with completely incompatible light. My advise is to leave this feature well alone and whatever you do do it yourself and be very careful of what you are trying to match.

When it comes to water, reflections - forget it - it is unsuitable. Period.

For dirty real estates shots this might save a little time, but admittedly it already takes longer to load it into PS and find the right sky than do the blend yourself. Mostly you only need to fix grey (i.e. blown out white) skies and the more blown out the easier the job is.

P.S. The guy in the video is wasting a lot of time doing the basic blend in the most complicated and awkward way possible. Oh well... I am sure more are on the way :bang:
 
Last edited:
LongLensPhotography said:
P.S. The guy in the video is wasting a lot of time doing the basic blend in the most complicated and awkward way possible. Oh well... I am sure more are on the way :banghead:
Click to expand...

Why am I doing this in an awkward way? I am looking at a tool that Adobe have made available then seeing what happens if you use it to put in the sky that was actually there.

As we all know there are many ways in which to blend images in Photoshop and it is inevitable that someone will want to do exactly what I demonstrated in the video instead of replacing a sky with one that wasn't there that they use the original sky.

If you don't look and test these things you'll never know what is and isn't possible.
 
Julian Elliott said:
Why am I doing this in an awkward way? I am looking at a tool that Adobe have made available then seeing what happens if you use it to put in the sky that was actually there.

As we all know there are many ways in which to blend images in Photoshop and it is inevitable that someone will want to do exactly what I demonstrated in the video instead of replacing a sky with one that wasn't there that they use the original sky.

If you don't look and test these things you'll never know what is and isn't possible.
Click to expand...

I suppose everything can be done in different ways. For example instead of simply adjusting exposure in lightroom I might load the file in photoshop, add a black or white layer, fiddle with oppacity and blend modes to get to the similar result. Well it's that sort of awkward too.

In your simple example you could just do a HDR merge and adjust as normal properly exposed single file. There probably wouldn't be even any issue and if it were you could fix that from either o a single file. That's hopefully what people will still be doing with their genuine skies seconds apart.

In complex example all you do is edit all source files identically in lightroom, match exposures and just mask in PS. Again much quicker and cleaner.

If you look into the layers that this sky tool creates you should clearly see by now that it tries to affect the foreground way too much for a compatible blend. Also the clean cut transitions are never great which even saw you shifting edges!

Hopefully apart from some short lived publicity it is so well hidden in the menus that a typical casual lightroom user won't even notice it for a long time to come.
 
@LongLensPhotography thanks for the reply.

What I wanted to do in this is just see how it performed. i'm versed in the various ways in which images can be blended either in Lightroom or Photoshop but you just know that people are going to try it as I did.

The complex example I did a blend that I put onto Instagram whereby it was just put together in Photoshop and a simple grad used to bring the two exposures together. But again it's interesting to see just how the tool is going to perform.

What I found odd in the second example is that it had to be scaled. That the tool didn't just simply bring it in.
 
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