>> Adobe Photoshop Elements
>> 30 Minutes
Difficulty: Medium
When you’re out walking and you have a camera, it’s always worth looking out for interesting skies, because you never know when they might come in useful. You don’t have to snap loads – a single sky can often be used to enhance lots of different images.
This is what’s been done here to transform a dull-looking landscape, creating a vivid sunset effect that’s quite easy to achieve. Usually when you blend in a new sky, your first thought might be how to create the right kind of selection, especially if you’ve got a complicated horizon with tricky tree lines, for example.
BEFORE: A scene like the one above can easily be blended with a sunset.
AFTER: The subject retains its authenticity in the late evening sunlight.
This method is much cruder, but also very effective. It uses blend modes rather than selections to combine the sky with the landscape, and a gradient mask to highlight the subject. This method does mean that the clouds in the sky layer can be visible when they’re overlaid on the darker foreground, but this can often add to the misty, moody effect.
The advantage of using a layer mask is that you can manually dab on the mask with a brush set to black, white or shades of grey to control the visibility of the sky layer.
If you’re using Elements prior to version 9, you can’t add layer masks to layers directly, but there is a workaround. First, create an adjustment layer below the layer you want to mask – but don’t make any adjustments. Now click between these two layers in the Layers panel to ‘clip’ the top layer to the adjustment layer. The adjustment layer’s mask will act as a mask for that top layer.
This "clipping’" process is used again in the walkthrough. You can use it to restrict an adjustment layer’s effect to the layer it’s clipped to, rather than all the layers below it. In this case, it’s used to change the color of the sky in a way that can easily be undone or modified later on.
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