A wonderful group of people traveled to my home base in Tennessee to take an intensive two day workshop with me last weekend, and we explored the techniques I use to create many of my images. One of the favorite techniques I demonstrate is the replacement of a white sky. In the shot of the elephant I photographed in Amboseli National Park, Kenya, for example, the white sky is very distracting. The problem, though, is that it is impossible to cut around all that grass so another sky can be pasted into the background. Photoshop has awesome capabilities, but it can't do that.
The only solution is to use a layer mask. I pasted a dark, stormy cloud photo over the entire elephant image and then, after making a layer mask (Layer > layer mask > reveal all), I used the gradient tool (a significantly underrated tool) to blend the clouds in such a way that they disappeared from the bottom portion of the image but stayed in the sky. I then used the brush tool to brush away the clouds from the elephant. Layer masks are not available in Elements.
Note that it's crucial to make the lighting in the sky match the bottom portion of the photo. It would look silly to put a blue sky with puffy white clouds in the background. The lighting on the pachyderm was soft and diffused, exactly like you would see from a sky like this. I have a large folder of sky photographs in my photo library just for composites like this.
If you would like to participate in a Photoshop workshop in my home, the May 2, 3 workshop is sold out, but there is still space available for July 11, 12.
1 comments:
Awesome...thanks for the tips :)
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