Adding Clouds to a blue sky

One of the most beautiful aspects of Southern California
is its blue skies, they can be so blue and clear you can see for miles, but how many photographs can you take before you start to get bored with the same blue sky over and over, and what do you do when the situation your photographing in makes you choose between dark underexposed subjects or a blown out sky. There is a way to fix this, and that is with photoshop. Is it cheating?… well a little bit but if it can make your photograph a little more engaging, and more importantly, make your client happy, then it is worth doing. So how do I put clouds into my clear blue skies?

First you have to photograph clouds. Yeah, that’s where you need to start. As easy as it should seem to be it’s not. The hardest part is finding good clouds to photograph. In the 5 years I have lived in Southern California there have not been that many cloudy days, and if it’s to cloudy, or hazy, that isn’t all that much fun either. Finding good clouds can be hard, you want puffy clouds, clouds with gray, basically clouds with an interesting personality. I find the best clouds are usually hovering over the hills and mountains to the north east of where I live. The have great shape, and tend to stretch off to the horizon. When you see good clouds, grab your camera, get a good exposure, and snap away. You will find that there is a tendency to try and zoom in on the clouds, but don’t do this, shoot kind of wide angled and get lots of sky, don’t worry if there are hills or trees in the bottom of your photograph, they can be taken out when you mask them in to another photograph. Try to frame your shot similar to the same way you would frame a landscape or a portrait, that way when you do put your clouds in another photograph they look like they belong. If you zoom in to close, or shoot at to high an angle the clouds will look out of place when you put them in a new photograph. Something else to keep in mind is the angle of light in your cloud photographs. If you are using them to replace a blue or blown out sky in another photograph and the light is oriented to the left of your subject, but the light in your cloud photograph is coming from somewhere else it will look wrong, so photograph a lot of clouds from all kinds of directions, and don’t be afraid to flip the cloud if it will look better that way. One of the coolest situations where you might want to replace the sky with clouds is if you have photographed someone at the beach during sunset. Pink or orange clouds can really spice up a photograph but they are not always there when you need them, so build a nice collection of clouds at sunset. You don’t always need to replace a clear blue sky with clouds but when you want to its good to have some around.

Second, how do I replace my clear blue sky or blown out sky with clouds? Open the photograph that needs to have the sky replaced, we will call this the original photo, then open a photograph that has the clouds you want to use. Copy the cloud photograph to a layer in your original photo, and put it at the bottom of the layer stack. Now there are quite a few ways to get the clouds to show up in your original photo. One is to blend the layers. With the original photo layer selected choose “Blending Options” from the layer styles menu. Use the Blend if sliders to bring the clouds forward and send the blue or blown out sky backward. Under a lot of circumstances this will work wonders. Play with the sliders until you get a good blend. Another solution that works well is to use the pen tool, magic wand, or your selection tool of choice to select the sky and apply a layer mask that allows the sky to show through. I will be putting together a tutorial in the future that will show how to do these two techniques in detail, but for now experiment and see if you can’t figure out the correct way that works best for you. Trying different techniques is the best way to learn what works best for you.

What is your favorite way of replacing a sky in your photographs? I am always interested in new and interesting ways of doing things.

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