Fixing the Sky - Including a Reflection

If you have taken a photograph and the sky is either washed out or it was a grey day and was a bit rubbish you can always attempt a fix in Photoshop or your chosen editor. You will need a little knowledge of photoshop (or your chosen editor, chosen editors may not do everything that PS does so apologies if it does not) as there are a few things that I mention that are common tools.

For this you will need a picture with a bad sky, a great sky picture and a little bit of time.

First open your image and give it a nudge in curves to make the white bits even whiter, don't over do it it will look wrong and you will lose detail too.

In the layers pallette make a new layer and then make the original layer 'layer from background' by right clicking the original layer and selected 'layer from background' Drag the original layer above new layer, this will make your image appear transparent later.

Using the colour Range tool in Select/Colour Range or right click on your image and select colour range. Select Highlights from the dropdown menu and click image and invert and use quick mask from the bottom drop down menu, this will colour your image using the highlighted areas with a mask.

When you click ok, the masked part of the image with be selected, you may need to inverse the mask using Select/inverse, don't worry if you make a mistake, remember you have the history bar and can go back a few steps. Press delete and you will see all the higlighted areas appear trasparent, (will appear as checkered area) deselect the mask. 

Open a sky of your choice, depending on your washed out image you may need to turn it into a mono, (I have used a mono image as it is easier in the tutorial, but I look forward to seeing your images in colour too) use the channel mixer method if you are, because if you use the desaturate method or greyscale it will affect your final image.

Also make sure that the sky will fit across the image, it will look odd if you have to stretch it,if your image is portrait as mine is then a full frame of sky in landscape covers the areas you need almost perfectly.

Drag the sky onto your image making sure that you line up one side of the sky with one edge of the original image, this will help aligning the reflection (if you are using the reflection method.

The sky will lay over the original layer at first as above, but drag your original image layer up over the new layer in the layer pallette and the sky will sit behind like so. 

Move your sky up till it sits on the horizon of your image this will help you when you are puttin the reflected sky in.

Carefully go along your horizon with the eraser tool taking out any overhang at the horizon, however if you have a perfect horizon you wont need to.

Select your sky image again and in Image/rotate canvas select flip vertical as you can see you now have a mirror image,

Drag this image onto your original image move it to the bottom and drag your original layer above and it will sit behind again like so.

As you can see the image looks false, however with a little work with the 2 sky layer opacitys you will eventually get the right mix crop to what you want slight nudge in curves and you can save it as your picture.

This took about 30 mins to do from scratch and I could have picked better images, but for illustration purposes the ones I used are not great quality.

Have fun but remember dont over do your reflections.

If you have any problems with this tutorial, please PM me (Hicarrumba) and I will try and explain further.