Enhancing blank skies is almost as old as photography. In the darkroom it involved carefully cut out masking; working in the lightroom is much easier. To start with, you should compile a gallery of cloud photos, many of which you can shoot in your own garden. You need all types of clouds, thin wisps and fluffy white ones as well as dramatic dark skies. Now for the nuts and bolts:-
1. Select your sky shot and open it in your software. This shot was taken in
Egypt
, so light wispy clouds are appropriate. Light direction is important and must be from the same direction as the light on the subject. You can flip the cloud image horizontally if it suits the subject better.
2.Open your image in the software. Create a Background Copy layer of and hit the eye button on the Background layer to hide it.
3.Erase the sky. There are various tools you can use. Two of the best are found under the eraser icon. Here, with the Background Copy layer selected, I used the Magic Eraser, but the Background eraser can work better with some subjects. Both of them can select areas through trees etc.
4.Clean the edges. Select the transparent area of the Background Copy layer. Use the Magic Eraser, set to a low Tolerance and with the Contiguous box unchecked. Use Select>Modify>Expand to increase the selection size by 2 or 3 pixels. Feather the selection by 1 or 2 pixels. Working at 100% magnification erase the pixels along the inside edge of the selection.
Add the Sky. Open the sky window, select the whole image Ctrl>A and copy it to the Clipboard Ctrl>C. Return to the image window, select the Background layer and use Ctrl>V to insert the sky between the two image layers. With the Sky layer selected, use the Transform tool Ctrl>T to size and position the sky. Check the image at 100% magnification make minor corrections if necessary and its done.
