A look behind the curtain

For Thomas, Kristy and anybody else who is interested.

On July 21 I posted this photo:

and this is the original

You might've noticed that the original has no clouds. Mother nature wasn't making clouds that day so I decided to add in clouds myself.

I'm a huge fan of clouds. 

1st you need clouds. If I ever see clouds I like, I snap them and keep them on file for later.

For this photo I used these clouds.

I use Adobe Photoshop CS3. If you have an older version of Photoshop you should still be able to follow along. You might even be able to blend in clouds using Barney's Pixel Fun. I can't be 100% sure though since I don't use B.P.F.

2nd step - Using the Move Tool in Photoshop drag the clouds onto the building.

Position them however you like them and then switch the blending mode on your Layers palette to Darken.

Now, depending on your image you may need to edit your clouds a little. Plus, from my experience, this trick only works with photos that have a white sky. Since the sky in my factory photo is completely washed out it worked perfectly. 

I added the clouds this way because I wanted to keep it easy. Although you could add clouds in a different way. There are usually several different ways to manipulate something, it just depends on the photo you're working with.

If you have a photo like this
here's another way to edit in a different sky.

Open up a vertical cloud photo out of your cloud photo archive and drag the cloud photo onto the tree photo using the Move Tool.


If you don't have a cloud photo archive you should really start making one.

Now take the Magic Wand tool and select the blue sky. Simply click anywhere in the blue area.

If you click to make your selection and some of the sky wasn't selected, like in this photo where the branches divide the sky into sections, then go up to Select and choose Similar and all other colors similar to your selection will become selected.




Now, with the cloud layer active hit Apple + J to move your cloud selection up into its own layer. On a PC it's Control + J.

Then go to your Layers palette and turn off the original cloud image that you dragged in by simply clicking off the eyeball on the left of the layer.

and voilà!