- Five Handy Things to Know Right Up Front about Masking
- Editing Your Main Subject
- What to Do If It Doesn't Work Perfectly
- Getting Better Masking Results
- Better Looking Skies, Method 1: Select Sky
- Better Looking Skies, Method 2: Linear Gradient
- Better Looking Skies, Method 3: Masking Objects
- Better Looking Skies, Method 4: Preserving Your Clouds Using a Luminance Mask
- Five Really Helpful Things to Know Now About the Brush Masking Tool
- Painting with Light (Also Known as "Dodging and Burning")
- The Brush's Awesome Auto Mask Feature (How to Not Mask "Outside the Lines")
- Fixing the White Balance in Just One Part of Your Image
- Retouching Portraits
- Selecting People in Group Photos
- Editing Landscape Images
- Editing Your Background
- The Easy Way to Mask Anything (Not Just the Subject)
- Changing the Color of Something in Your Image (Point Color)
- Eight More Masking Things You'll Want to Know
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Better Looking Skies, Method 1: Select Sky
We’re going to look at four different ways to make better looking skies, and the first one is the easiest because it uses more of that AI/machine learning to automatically select the sky for you. Once the sky is masked, you can then apply whatever edits you want and they’ll only be applied to the sky.
Step One:
At the top of the right side panels, click on the Masking icon (the circle with the white dotted lines around it, in the toolbox right below the histogram) to reveal the Add New Mask panel with the masking tools. Now, click on the Sky icon (as shown here), and it selects the sky for you (even if it’s a pretty tricky sky to select).
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Step Two:
After a second or two a red tint appears over the sky (as seen here), which lets you know what Select Sky has masked for you.
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Step Three:
Once the sky is masked, I have a three-move edit to make it look deeper and richer: (1) I lower its brightness by dragging the Exposure slider to the left until it’s looking good (when you click on a slider, the red tint is hidden, so you can see your sky as you’re editing), then (2) I drag the Contrast slider to the right to add more contrast, and lastly, (3) I increase the Whites slider, so the clouds don’t look like rain clouds, and it adds some brilliance to the sky. This three-step move works really well for making the sky look better in most images (sadly, nothing works perfectly for every image, but that’s why we have different methods, right?).
TIP: Seeing Which Masks You Used
In the Masks panel, click on Mask 1 (or Mask 2, Mask 3, etc.) to reveal which edits you made to that mask. Here, if you click on Mask 1, you’ll see a smaller thumbnail below it called “Sky 1,” so you’d know that you applied a Select Sky adjustment mask.
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