When shooting with a digital camera there are a lot of advantages, but also a few disadvantages. The trick is to make the most of the advantages and deal effectively with the disadvantages.

A problem area can be those lovely blue skies. Due to the even nature of the colour the pixels seem to show that much more, so how can we deal with that effectively.

It is a simple case of replacing the sky, but that is not always as easy as it sounds either. It is difficult to always find a sky that matches your image, so why not create one within your software. The trick is to use the exact same colour of your sky and a couple of other little tips and tricks along the way.

Cutting the sky out of a picture like our buildings above is not that difficult, but first call up the layers palette via the shortcut key F7. Drag the thumbnail of your image down over the centre icon at the bottom of the layers palette to create a copy. Ignore the bottom copy for now and select the one on top of the stack as shown below.

Use your magic wand tool to select the sky area. Remember that the tolerance of the magic wand can be adjusted if too much of the sky is selected or not enough. By holding the shift key while using the wand you can also add to your selection gradually building it up. It is probably best to set the tolerance a little low and build rather than trying to get it perfectly selecting all the blue sky in one go.

 

Feather the edge of your selection by 1-2 pixels and choose cut from the edit menu to take out the sky. If nothing appears to have happened make sure you have the layer on the bottom of the stack switched off. Do this by clicking the little eye to the left of the thumbnail. You may want to take this opportunity to correct any converging verticals or straighten your building up by using the edit transform tools.

Create a new blank layer by clicking that centre icon at the bottom middle of the layers palette. Remember that dragging a thumbnail over that icon will make a copy of your layer, while clicking it will create a new blank layer. Drag that layer into the middle of your stack between your original image and the one with the sky removed as shown below.

Select your original bottom layer along with the eyedropper tool.

 

Click at the top of your sky in the area of deepest blue and then hold the Alt key and click in the area just where the sky meets the buildings as shown below

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You will see that your foreground and background colours now perfectly match your sky colour as the example shows.

 

Turn off your original background layer and select your new blank layer along with the gradation tool. Select a foreground to background gradation by double clicking the gradation icon.

Starting at the top edge of your blank layer click and pull down a line to a point where the buildings meet the sky. Photoshop will create a gradation in the colours you chose and if you have selected the colours carefully the new gradation will look perfect.

The next stage may sound a little odd after spending time cleaning up the sky, but add about 3 pixels of monochrome noise from PhotoShop's filter menu to your new sky. You need just a hint of texture to prevent your sky looking plastic and false when it is printed.