Before (Plain, Overcast Sky)	After (Colorful & Interesting Sky)

Some regions are prone to dull overcast skies, like London or Seattle. If your design project requires a photo from such a place, it can be difficult to acquire one without the white or gray dreariness looming above the horizon of your images. A "plain" sky can also come from a clear sky- especially if the photographer had too much exposure or did not use appropriate filters. If you are stuck with the boring-sky syndrome, try adding interest by enhancing the sky yourself!

Enhancing the sky in a photo can add color, contrast and texture to an otherwise plain, empty, and potentially off-balance photo. You can quickly turn a dull and dismal photo to an engaging one! Let's get started!

In choosing your sky background, we recommend the following:

1. Avoid using Photoshop's Render > Clouds filter. Though this filter does have its uses and could potentially work for a sky or clouds background, it usually "looks" fake and computer-generated.

2. For maximum realism, we recommend you choose natural cloud photo backgrounds. If you already have a collection of hi-res cloud & sky stock photos, this will work great. Otherwise, Turbo Photo just "happens" to have a CD-ROM for you (wink): Natural Clouds or Natural Clouds II.

3. Try to find a background that will complement your image. If your subject is visually complex, choose a simple background. If your subject is simple, you may try for a more complex or visually stimulating background pattern. Likewise, try to match your lighting conditions as close as possible. For example, it would look odd to have a sunset background behind a foreground that is illuminated from the midday sun. Sunsets, for example, would be better suited for dark silhouetted foregrounds.

For this example, we have chosen "Clouds (93)" from the Natural Clouds CD-ROM.

Having a solid white or gray sky actually works to your advantage when creating a mask. In Photoshop, there are many ways to accomplish this. The following are a few techniques we recommend.

1. MAGIC WAND... If your background is a solid white or gray and has no delicate thin lines in the foreground, then the magic wand might work just fine as a fast & dirty solution. With the magic wand selected, make sure both "Anti-alised" and "Contiguous" checked in the tool options bar, and try using a "32" tolerance to start.

After you select your background, if parts of your foreground have transparent pieces and are not yet included in the selection, try choosing Select > Similar. This may or may not yield acceptable results.

2. SELECT > COLOR RANGE... This is our preferred method to make the mask, as it can be both very easy and quite precise. Again, this depends on the color range of your image. If the background colors are not duplicated in the foreground, then the mask job will be easy. Otherwise, it may take some extra fine tuning.

In the Color Range dialog box, first click on the background of the black & white thumbnail. You may then experiment with the Fuzziness slider for optimum results. Ideally, the edges of your mask will be slightly soft, while not having parts of your foreground drop out. For even more precise color masking, use the "Add to sample" and "Subtract from sample" eyedroppers on the right side of the dialog box. For example, with the "Add to sample" tool selected, click multiple times around the background of the image; the more you click, the more you may pick up additional colors to be masked. To be yet even more precise, choose "Grayscale" from the Selection Preview drop menu, then you may use your actual image (behind the dialog box), to zoom in and adjust the masked colors.

3. FILTER > EXTRACT... This option works well, but it can require more work. You need to manually draw a highlight line around your foreground, then use the Fill tool to fill in the rest of the foreground. Note: the highlight tool must form a complete a sealed line across or in a circle for the fill tool to not 'leak' through to the background. Other adjustments can be made on the side of the dialog box to fine tune the mask.

Remember to save your mask, in case you accidentally deselect it. Just choose Select > Save Selection. And always remember to Save your Photoshop file...often! Now that we have our mask made, let's drop in the background...

You may either place your clouds background image behind your foreground image, or you may have your background image masked and above your "foreground" layer. Either way is fine. For this purpose, we will paste the background layer underneath the foreground. Remember to delete the 'old sky' area from the foreground layer.

If you're lucky, your image is ready-to-go as is. However, in many cases, there may be a few white edges or remnants of the old background showing up between your foreground and new background. For professional results and convincing realism, let's do some final cleanup work.

BEFORE 1 White edge outline from previous background showing. White gaps showing in bell tower and by clock.	BEFORE 2 Overcompensated: Too much white edge removed = lost detail.	AFTER White edges removed; detail preserved.

Typical of Photoshop, there are many ways to attain the same result. For cleaning up the edges, we will mention three techniques...

1. To remove the white edge in the "Before 1" photo above, we first will try Layer > Matting > Remove White Matte. This automatic feature may just get the job done, but since there are so many variables in each image, it likely won't work every time. For this reason, we will continue with additional steps, in case your project requires a little more effort.

2. The next thing to try is Layer > Matting > Defringe. From this dialog, you may then experiment with how many of your white background pixels need to be defringed. Make sure you always duplicate your foreground layer, and save often, so you can return to the original in case any mistakes are made.

3. If you still have a white outline issue, or if Defringe didn't work good enough, you may try a more manual approach:

a. Select the foreground image. Hold CTRL and click on the foreground layer OR choose Select > Load Selection... (if you saved it).
b. Choose Select > Modify > Contract... (Start with a low amount of pixels to contract then increase as necessary. We'll start with 2.)
b. Choose Select > Feather... (Now, try entering in same number you contracted the selection by, so we enter 2 again in this case)
c. Choose Select > Inverse
d. Now, click the Delete key on the keyboard.
e. To see the results more clearly, hide the selection by clicking CTRL+H
f. If white pixels are still showing, just repeat the process, but increase the # of pixels, and likewise, if it removed too much and lost detail (ref. the BEFORE 2 photo above), then simply reduce the pixels.
g. For the greatest amount of edge removal control, use the procedure above, but instead of clicking the delete key, choose the Eraser tool and use a 20% opacity, then zoom into each outline area and manually erase the white edge.
h. Now we have our end result- no more white edge, but the original edge detail remains (ref. AFTER photo above).

Now you can kick back and admire the fruit of your labor! We hope this guide helps you in the future to add pizzazz to otherwise dull photos you're forced to work with. If you are already aware above techniques, perhaps this guide simply confirmed how smart you are with Photoshop already! Please stop back by www.turbophoto.com for more Photoshop tips in the future.

By Trent Mueller, © 2004 Turbo Photo™
Reproductions require permission. Please contact: info@turbophoto.com
www.turbophoto.com

Photoshop Trick 1: Create Electrifying Special FX Backgrounds

Photoshop Trick 2: Create Perfect & Sharp Screenshots at 300dpi

Photoshop Trick 3: Add Pizzazz to Dull Photos