Swapping the sky

Mike C

Mike C

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Hi all, I recently put a couple posts in the landscape section of sunrise's and sunsets. I had trouble exposing the whole scene and a few TPers suggested I tried taking two shots and exposing one for the foreground and one for the sky, then merge them. I have never done this before, so I looked on youtube for a tutorial on PS elements 14 and adapted it for elements 7.

Here are my two starting pictures
IMG_1105 by mike Cartwright, on Flickr
golf today 021 by mike Cartwright, on Flickr

I selected the blue sky using the rectangular marque tool and moved it into the tree picture and resized it. I then reduced its opacity so I could see the original tree pic through it. I then used the erasure tool, set to soft edged brush, and started to rub away the sky that covered the land and the tree. I had the opacity of the brush set 100%, and where the fine detail was like the smaller trees on the horizon I set the opacity to 50% so that hopefully there would be no definate line.

This is the finished picture
tree edit by mike Cartwright, on Flickr

I'm not really after any critique of the finished shot, its only a practice effort, but I was wondering if I have used the best tools to achieve it? I really am a PS novice, and this is the most major thing I have ever tried!
Any tips are gratefully welcomed. Sorry if this should be in the landscape section, Mods feel free to move it.
 
The main issue here is that it's going to be hard to match the foreground lighting to the background that you pasted in, you seem to have done a decent job of editing the foreground but with such drastically different lighting it's a big issue.
 
Thanks for replying, I totally agree with your comments. I chose these two pictures to merge as they are so different. It was more of an exercise to see if I could do it, I wasn't really concerned if the final image looked correct or not. I just wanted to get the sky in neatly and I was wondering if I used the best tools to do it.
I intend to use this technique to blend bracketed exposures, such as sunrise or sunset shots.
 
It's probably better not to actually erase parts of the sky layer, but to mask it using a layer mask. The effect would be the same, but hiding parts of a layer, rather than removing them means it's much easier to correct any mistakes at any later stage. It's also easy to switch between adding and removing the mask with the X key. And sometimes it's quicker to use a big fat brush to, say, remove the whole blob of sky at the tree top, then paint back in the bits of sky in between.

Plus there are other techniques to save you having to do all the manual painting work. See youtube.

And watch out for those who will object to any such 'naughty' manipulation.
 
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I think the OP is using Elements (7), so layer masks are a bit less easy to access/manipulate.
 
Sadly, some people genuinely believe that. Which is fine. Until they start giving advice to novices.
 
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Thanks for the advice. I googled layer masks for elements, and officially they're not supported. But if I open an adjustment layer it has a layer mask with it. I think it then said if I put my background layer into it, I effectively create a layer mask. I'll read it a couple more times and then give it a go.
I had gimp, but now use Canon dpp. Elements 7 and Picasa, I think that's enough for me!
 
Half an hour is pretty good going with all those fiddly bits on the horizon and the tree in the foreground'
 
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