Sometimes the biggest challenge with outdoor landscape and architectural photography is finding nice daytime skies when you are photographing. Unfortunately skies are not something you can ever control. So one solution to the problem is simply accepting the sky you have and then fixing your skies later in Photoshop.

When replacing a sky in a photo there are two main steps to the process. First step is selecting and isolating the sky area so that you can work on it it. The second step is replacing the sky itself once you have the area of the sky selected in Photoshop.

So in this tutorial I am going to briefly talk about sky selection and then focus more on what to actually do to replace the sky to give you a bluer and nicer, but natural looking sky. There are various methods and techniques for replacing skies that people use, but I am going to show you how to do it as quickly as possible with just a few mouse clicks. And the best thing about my method is that it doesn’t require you to use another photo of a sky in order to replace yours.

So let’s get started. For this tutorial I am going to be using a photo I shot yesterday of the beautiful Royal Grand Palace in Bangkok. Below is the original image right out of my camera with no processing or adjustments added.

Below is the image after I made minimal adjustments in Camera RAW and brought the image into Photoshop. Mainly I adjusted tint to give the Grand Palace a bit more of a magenta tone. It also had an effect on the sky, but that isn’t going to matter for what we will be doing with this image.

The first step is I create a new blank layer above my background layer in Photoshop. Then I use the color picker to set my foreground color to #0a4fa8.

And I set my background color to #b3daf6.

Here is what my colors now look like in the tool bar:

Then I select and enable the gradient tool in the tool bar. I click and hold down the mouse and I draw a line on my blank layer going from the top of the sky down to where it meets the horizon in my photo. See the line I drew with the gradient tool shown on the image below.

Then release the mouse and after you do that you end up with a gradient color layer of blue covering the whole image. The blue color runs all the way from the top to the bottom of the image even though I stopped the line at the horizon. But that is fine. Next we will mask out all parts of our colored layer that we don’t want and leave just color on the layer to fill the sky. See my layer below with a full color gradient on it.

Next step, click on the little eye icon on the layers palette to hide the new color layer that you created just for now. See what the hidden layer should look like (I outlined it in pink in a screen shot of the layers palette below).

Next step is selecting just the sky area to use to make a mask with it on your new sky layer. Again there are many techniques to this that people use. Some involve using channels or luminosity masks to more cleanly select just the sky, but I am going to use a traditional old Color Range selection. What I normally do is go to the Select menu at the top, then go to Color Range, and then set the fuzziness to 60. Then I move my mouse in the sky area within the color range dialogue box and click around until I see most of the sky area is in white. Then I click OK.

After you click OK on the Color Range dialogue box you will see a marching ants selection on your photo like in the screen shot below.

Then I click on the quick mask tool in the tool bar and manually clean up the mask with a brush to remove any areas of the selection which are infringing upon other areas.

To do this first select the brush tool and then change your foreground and background colors back to black and white. Then click on the Quick Mask tool. Then select black from the tool palette to add red to your quick mask and to take away unwanted areas from your selection. Switch and use white color with a brush to remove red on your quick mask and add to your sky selection. This technique will get tricky though with a sky that has lots of small tree branches and leaves. So this is why I am not going to get too much into making sky selections as there are different ways to select the sky if you have lots of little leaves and things in the sky. I will save the technique of making tricky sky selections for another future tutorial. Meanwhile, in the screen shot below, you can see my image with quick mask turned on. The areas that are not part of my sky selection are shown in red by the quick mask.

So for now, once you have your sky selection cleaned up, get out of quick mask by clicking on the Quick Mask toolbar button again and you should just be left with the marching ants remaining on your screen showing you your sky area which has been selected. See the screen shot below.

Then enable your sky layer again that you created by clicking on the eye next to it to make it visible again. Then click on the new mask layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette. This will add a layer mask to your sky color layer and show the new sky that you created only present within the area where you want it. See my results below.

Then, to make sure that the sky has been fully replaced, click and hold down the Control key on your keyboard and then click on the layer mask of the sky you just created. This will bring back the marching ants again on the selection you created. Then click on the layer mask of the sky in your layer palette that you just created to active it again. Then go to the Edit menu, select Fill, and then fill with White at 100% opacity. This will clean up your layer mask of the sky and make sure there are not any stray pixels left out of your sky selection.

Next thing is to blend your new sky with the original sky in order to give the replacement sky a more natural look. There are a couple of different ways to do this and which method will work best also depends upon what type of image you are working with. The first method is you can simply change the blend mode to “Soft Light” on your new sky layer. This will blend the new sky very naturally with the original sky, but in some cases the effects of the new replacement sky could end up being too subtle.

To give yourself more control leave the new sky layer blend mode as Normal. Instead go and play with the opacity of the new sky layer you created and reduce it down to 60% and then see how it looks. You can then increase or decrease the opacity as needed to make it look more natural. I think for this image an opacity of 60% is just about right. Below is what my image looks like now.

If you feel the sky is still a bit too dark though and still doesn’t look natural enough then you can add a Levels adjustment just onto the sky only. First hold down the Control key on your keyboard and then click on the mask of your new sky’s layer. This will make a selection of marching ants active again on your sky only.

Then go down to the bottom of your layers palette and create a new Levels adjustment layer. This will automatically add a mask to the levels adjustment so that it just effects the selection of the sky. Then adjust your levels on the sky as you would like them. Below is the levels adjustment I added to my sky. Note that you can make your sky as bright or dark with levels as you wish.

Below is my final image with the levels on the sky brightened up. This is a 60% new sky and 40% original sky blended together. If you want more or less of your original sky you can change the opacity of the new sky to whatever you please.

If you would like to have this image of the Royal Grand Palace for your own use you can acquire it here as a 21MP TIF file from ThaiFotos.com. Also, a horizontal version of the image can be acquired here.

I hope you found this tutorial useful and informative and if you have any questions or comments on this technique please feel free to post them. And please kindly like this post by clicking on some of the social media icons below to share it with your friends.