Exercise: Addition

For this exercise I had to look at taking a landscape picture and changing the appearance of the sky.

From a shooting perspective I used a tripod to take a series of images at different exposures with a view to producing two images - one with the sky exposed correctly and the other exposed for the land.

For the land exposure I used the average meter reading from the camera.  For the sky I under-exposed by a stop.

Exposed as per the average meter reading

One stop under-exposed

Photograph adjusted in PS using the eraser tool.  

Another way of changing the sky is to use the Magic Wand tool to select the sky using the lasso tool where necessary to include or deselect elements accordingly.  Once the selection has been made you can the save it and delete the sky from the upper image.  This will leave you with a similar image to the one above.  However, you have more control over the image selection using the Magic Wand tool.  It is also a quicker way of achieving the result.

Image adjusted using the magic wand tool.

Adding a new sky to the image

There is also the option to add a different sky to the image above.  This too is intervention but unlike above it it not at legitimate.  You are taking two images one with a better sky and adding that to your landscape.  Above you are taking two images of the exact same scene which capture the full range of brightness in the image.  This seems more like a natural process.  

With sky replaced

I'm not so sure that this works.  Perhaps I would need a sky with more white in it or even a brighter sky.  Maybe because I know the sky does not belong to the image I know that it is not right.  The reflection of the clouds is not mirrored in the water correctly.  

I don't think that replacing the sky is something that I would ever really want to do with my photographs.  I feel that it is a step too far.