You may have heard that there’s been an update to Adobe’s Creative Cloud, it’s always a time of excitement and wonder … well, to me it is! This update didn’t disappoint with a whole slew of great features. In this video I showcase Sky Replacement in Photoshop, alongside Adobe Bridge and Camera Raw — both of which also had updates.
Many features, Sky Replacement among them, use Adobe Sensei, Adobe’s artificial intelligence (AI). Sensei is able to assess an image very quickly and make adjustments, corrections and selections very quickly. Its accuracy is pretty good and has many features that can save a photographer a great deal of time.
Sky Replacement is one of those features that saves time and helps lackluster photogs like me out considerably. The image I use in this demonstration has been in my folder “system” for quite some time. I knew a decent sky would help it out, but i didn’t realize just how much until i tried it with Photoshop 2021.
Is it new?
We’ve had Foreground Selection and the Object Selection for a while, so this feature feels like an extension to that rather than something completely new. The resulting layers and masks from a few choices is nice and reminds me of Photoshop Elements, but don’t let that sway you — this is a powerful and helpful feature.
Is It useful? To who?
Yes, it is. For all photographers from me all the way up. Mother Nature doesn’t always play ball no matter how much you stare at The Photographer’s Ephemeris so this is a good back up. You can add your own sky images to the default ones that come with the update so if you have the perfect sky in another image, use that too.
Adobe wants us to get out and take photos rather than sit for hours at the computer, and this certainly goes a long way to make that possible.
Eric, much appreciated, this was a very good explanation, easy to follow. I think I am going to change quite a number of my travel photos that have bland skies. I mostly edit my photos in Lighroom, so have three questions. 1. I have a collection of my own sky photos, will any of them do, for example if their resolution is much lower than that of the edited photo (say 6 Mpix vs 24 Mpix)? Is it possible to not use a sky photo, but cut out the sky from photo with other objects, and place it in the… Read more »