How to Handle a Tricky Night Sky Replacement

In the last few years, we have seen tremendous steps forward in the realm of automated sky replacement, and a task that used to be rather tedious and time-consuming is often a one-click operation. It is not always perfect, though, and trickier situations can sometimes throw off even the best software. This helpful video tutorial will show you a clever workaround for dealing with a difficult night sky replacement that will save you a lot of time over manual editing. 

Coming to you from Milky Way Mike, this awesome video tutorial will show you a great workaround for leveraging Photoshop's automatic sky replacement feature with a tricky night sky. As you will see in the video, the difficulty arises in a night-sky situation because of the inherently low contrast of such scenes, which makes it difficult for Photoshop's algorithm to accurately find the correct edges. While you can always fall back on manually masking in the sky, as you can see in this example, that would be particularly tedious and time-consuming. Luckily, by approaching the problem from the other direction, you can quickly create a flawless automatic replacement and save yourself a lot of headache and effort. Check out the video above for the full rundown. 

Alex Cooke's picture

Alex Cooke is a Cleveland-based portrait, events, and landscape photographer. He holds an M.S. in Applied Mathematics and a doctorate in Music Composition. He is also an avid equestrian.

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