Select area behind foreground, like sky behind trees?

[timfonteno Profile]

If I want to change the sky, and there are trees in the foreground, how do I select the sky and not the trees?

[Arwin Profile]

Hi timfonteno,

I guess you figured out you need to use the Select Area tool for this kind of tasks, if not you first need to go to Select Area by clicking on equal named button on the right side of your screen, when a selections window poped up, choose for 'Sky'.

Now you can use the brushes on the left to select the Sky, I think in your case it's best to use 'Find Soft Edges'. Drag back all the way to the left the 'Detector Size' slider, now you can select the sky parts of your image, if the branches are still difficult, use the shift key while selecting the parts around the branches (hover above a sky part, press the shift key and hold while making a selection around the branches)

Another approach is to use the 'Erase From Selection' on the Branches, also you can turn your image (Selections) in Black and White by using the button you see below, makes it als easer to select or deselect.

bw.jpg (4.35 KiB) Viewed 5379 times

In this video you see how you can refine your mask


Hope this will help you, succes!
Arwin

[admin]

Hi,

I've found with sky you're almost always better off trying to select the sky rather than deselect the trees. The key things to know are keep the inner circle always completely covering the sky and use the outer circle of the selection brush to go over areas which have sky and trees in them. To get in to complicated areas, use the shift key to freeze the inner circle over the sky. Have a bit of a play and you'll soon get the hang of it.

Tony