Towards the end of 2020, Photoshop added a handy new tool to their extensive library – the Sky Replacement tool.

So what exactly is it useful for?

Well, there are a few situations in which you might want to replace the sky in an image.

The first is when you’ve blown the sky in your image. One of the trickiest skills to master when backlighting is getting your exposure right so you retain the detail in the sky without casting your subject into full shadow.

Sometimes it can even be easier as a deliberate creative choice to expose for your subject and then drop a sky replacement in when you’re editing to cover the blown sky.

Or  you might simply just want to add a little more interest to your image with a more dramatic sky than the one you captured in camera, which is exactly what I’ve done in this video.

I deliberately exposed this image to retain the detail in the sky as I planned to keep the original sky, but when I got playing with it in Photoshop, I realised the wide expanse of negative space was the perfect canvas for a dramatic edit!

In this video, I will show you how I used Photoshop’s new ‘Sky Replacement’ tool to replace the sky in the image, including how to add your own custom skies to Photoshop’s sky library.

I’ll also show you the basic edits I made in Lightroom before taking the image into Photoshop for more advanced edits, plus how I used the clone tool to remove unwanted objects, and how I applied a texture overlay to add a little more colour and depth.

Happy Editing!

Related: How To Use Photoshop Overlays

Related: 24 Stunning Photoshop Edits For Portraits

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