Up in the Clouds

After getting our money’s worth out of Photoshop CS6, released in May 2012, we were finally forced to buy into the subscription program last year with new computer purchases. Now to be fair, architecture and landscapes don’t really get that much attention from Adobe in the form of new updates, so now big deal. However, CS6 finally outlived it capability with new versions of Apple OSX, forcing us to shell out money every month for Photoshop.

As much as I hate buying into subscriptions, it turns out Photoshop added in some God sends last year, including a powerful new sky replacement and sky select feature. Selecting a sky the old fashion way was an arduous task, especially whenever you had trees in the image. Unfortunately, with translights, this was always necessary since you need a 100% pixel for pixel registration between the day and night images when you go to print. Everything, including the skies, need to match when printing. Not to mention, you don’t always get the best skies when you are shooting. Many hours would be spent on either adding in a decent sky, or selecting the day sky and adding it to the night image (after editing it to look like night). Now this process is cut down dramatically.

For example, in the image below, which was used in Glass Onion; Knives Out, the actual sky the day of shooting was rather dreary. With sky replacement, in less than a minute, I was able to replace the sky with something better and have it look very convincing.

Or, you can just make an existing sky appear more charming. As an another example, the image below was captured from my New Orleans hotel room on a rainy day in October. Although the shape of the clouds is nice, there are some dark rain clouds in the sky. Using the replace sky feature, I was able to overlay a brighter sky giving the already existing sky a nicer feel.

To conclude, ever since I have been using this new feature, I have been putting together my own library of high res panoramic skies to use in our backdrops. Below are some skies you may seem in our backdrops.