How to make a sky look like you replaced it

[Phelon Profile]

Sometimes you think it's better to replace a sky, but maybe it's not. Here is a before and after picture to illustrate that. It's a picture in downtown San Remo on the Italian Riviera. There are street car wires, antennas and their fine wires, a flag pole, etc. filling the sky area. It is a tricky job to try to replace the sky here.

My routine is to use the Area Brush and brush over the sky area including the wires, etc. I hold down the Shift Key to first select an area of the sky, and then begin painting the sky. OK, now go to the Area Control Panel and slide, usually to the very left, the Temperature Slide to bring in/out your color that you didn't see before. You may need to tweak the Tint color with the bottom slide. This procedure does a remarkable job to enhance and make it look normal without losing the fine-definition of the antennas and wires. If need be, sometimes using a couple of other sliders in the Area Control panel may be needed. That's it.

I started out enhancing this picture with the Straightening Tool; then I used the Effects Gallery and chose Hyper-Real. Then I chose the Area tool once again and painted any dark areas and used the Brighten and/or Exposure tool. Then I chose a new Area and painted the places I wanted to be sharper. I'm up to at least three or four Areas now using the Area-Brush tool. I do a lot of painting to enhance most of my pictures.

The white-color balance, noise, and chromatic aberration are adjustments I go elsewhere, if need be.

So, after giving my picture these improvements, I'm ready to publish (email, catalog, whatever).

Phelon

_MG_8875_Resize.jpg (412.94 KiB) Viewed 6475 times

_MG_8875_pe2X_Resize.jpg (562.52 KiB) Viewed 6476 times

[Phelon Profile]

To further look for improvements (suggestions) in your sky, for example, click on the dull-multi-colored icon at top of area treatment panel called Gallery. This will give you a mini-sample of effects on several smaller pages. If you find none to your liking, click on the icon to the left of Gallery called Tone--that will take you back to the original sliders for your selected area.

NOW comes a big choice--click on the bottom icon of the Image Treatment called Auto, and a window comes up for you to choose what your subject is--in this case, choose SKY. THEN go to top right Gallery icon and click ONCE (or just HOVER over Gallery icon). This brings up a small window with word SKY written near bottom of window; SELECT this word, SKY, and it will give you a few hundred Effects for your Sky selection. This is just a different way to enter the Effects main Gallery, and I like this method, mainly because I seem to be able to paint in or out more DETAIL like antennas, wires, tree branches. Maybe that's just me.

Anyway, I knew about this "trick" when I first posted, but I didn't want to make it too complicated.

Cheers Everybody! Continue to have a great summer.

Phelon

[Phelon Profile]

One VERY important technique when painting: reduce the middle circle (the bottom slider for paint brush size) to almost nothing, which means the very left of that slider, or almost to left. This narrows down the number of colors your brush will be sensitive to when painting. If your entire sky is white, or nearly so, you should NOT let-up on the SHIFT KEY while painting. If your sky changes color in an area, then go ahead and release your shift key to pick up a new set of colors for that area. It's possible you may have to do this several times for YOUR particular sky area. Just keep trying and you'll get a result that pleases you (paint throughout trees, and other objects).

Finally, on painting, you will have created a B/W (black/white) mask, which probably will need cleaning up (you may see some lighter-colored or grayish looking) of some smudgy areas in the mask. You will see this in the MASK TAG on the upper-right of page. Just click on the colored TAG next to the Mask, and that will bring both the colored and the mask down to your left side of page. Then click on the mask on the left-area treatment, and clean out any smudges.

With these techniques of using the mask, you can have great results with SPE. Just keep practicing.

Phelon

[Phelon Profile]

I also forgot, and have to add, that sometimes after painting and getting a mask, and then checking on SKY by hovering over the Effects icon, and clicking on the mask tag and expecting it to go to the left panel working area, the program crashes.

To get around this, reopen your project by saying YES in the RECOVERY window. Reopen project and SAVE AS A SESSION. After saving, close your SPE application, then reopen. I know--it sounds weird. After reopening SPE, then select the SESSION file in the LEFT PANEL (called LOAD MY IMAGE). This, of course, opens your SKY project that you saved as a session, and you can NOW click on the MASK TAG at top right, and it will now open correctly in the left panel--WITHOUT crashing. Now is the time to clean up your mask in the left panel. This clean up may be all you need to do to Finally SAVE your image with the new sky.

Hopefully, the new SPE up-grade will take care of this crashing and work-a-round.

So, there you have it. A pretty complete study how to turn out some amazing new skies.

Phelon

PS Might I add, that you may have some skies that you like better than what is in the SPE Gallery of sky images, so go ahead and learn how to import your own skies and save them to your Favorites panel. I do.

[Phelon Profile]

There is one thing that you might already have learned, and that is what to do if you like several effects for your sky.

In the TAG Section (the upper-right of work page) where you have a TAG for each TOOl you used and a TAG for your confirmed SKY EFFECT, if you went beyond the simple paint-masking and slider adjustments, and you have saved one SKY effect and want to input a new SKY from the Gallery, just DO THIS: Go to the confirmed sky tag and in its upper-left corner is an small EYE ICON and CLICK on it. That will disable the SKY EFFECT. Then go to the gallery once again hovering over the Gallery icon and selecting SKY in the small window--you can then make another sky effect selection, save it, and repeat the process for however many different skies you want to save.

Sorry my windup was so slow, but I'm sure you'll find my throw accurate.

Phelon