Photoshop 2021 was released to the public yesterday and it contains a bunch of AI powered tools. Using Adobe’s Sensei AI, Photoshop can understand the contents of a picture and perform actions according to the depth of a scene and what’s in it.
This is the kind of effect we’re aiming to achieve, and we’ll do it with just two of Photoshop’s tools:
- After opening your photo in Photoshop go to Edit > Sky Replacement.
- Click the ‘sky’ dropdown to select a preset style. There are currently three categories of skies to choose from: blue skies, spectacular and sunsets. Picking a sky with similar lighting conditions to your scene will produce a more believable result.
- You can fiddle around with the other variables in this tool window to adjust the result. Notice the tool adjusts the colour and brightness of other elements of your scene, attempting to replicate the sky’s effect on the landscape. Click OK when you’re done.
- Now we could do with making conforming the scene’s atmosphere a little more to match the sky, and for this we can use another of Photoshop’s new Sensei powered AI tools. So, select your background layer and navigate to Filter > Neural Filters. Click the beta filters icon and turn on Depth-Aware Haze.
- You may or may not want actual haze (it’ll make your scene look foggy), but you very probably want to adjust the warmth of your scene to match your sky, especially if you’ve chosen something radically different. A negative value will make the scene cooler, positive warmer. Click OK, et voila!
Is there a way to bulk load skies into the set so they are always available
When you select the new sky to use, at the bottom of the dropdown box there are buttons to add a new collection and new skies, which you can select from your computer. You can even delete the source image you used and Ps will hold onto its copy for repeated future use.