It was all about SKY in this lesson- replacing sky, to be exact.
There was not a cloud in the sky yesterday when I walked over to the open space in my neighborhood to take this photo. I took a few shots, mindful that I was going to have to use the Quick Selection tool in Photoshop when I edited this photo. Selection tools and cloning and healing brushes were the hardest things for me when I first started photo editing. I have become fairly proficient with cloning and healing, but tend to avoid the selection tools most of the time. I like brushing best- so often use Quick Mask, which I learned in Damien Symonds’ class, instead of the other selection tools.
For this assignment, I downloaded some skies, following Kim’s link, forgetting that I have a couple available in Perfect Effects, and was pretty successful with my Quick Selection tool. I ended up converting it to a black and white, possibly because I had just watched a Moose Peterson series of videos on Kelby Training on black and white photography.
Replacing skies will probably not be big in my arsenal of Photoshop tricks, although it is great to know how to do it- and I need more practice. I felt like I had crossed some sort of line with this assignment. When I saw Scott Kelby last year, he said his rule for himself was he felt comfortable removing items from a photo (telephone wires, tourists, etc.), but not adding things. He had replaced a sky once, but never felt right about it. But in Moose Peterson’s video that I watched yesterday, he casually remarked that he sometimes combines waves from three photos when photographing the ocean. And I read on Damien Symonds’ Facebook page last night that he has been known to clone eyelashes (!) from one eye to another to fix an out-of-focus eye when he is retouching photos. Wow!
I do love Photoshop!
melinda anderson photography 