PS creates blue sky background for photos

Scenery original picture

final effect

1. Remove the background. The first thing to do is to separate the girl, grass and trees in the foreground from the white sky in the background. We use the "Extract" command to achieve this purpose. Select the menu command "Filter → Extract" to open the Extract command dialog box. Select the top edge highlight tool in the toolbar on the left (the shortcut key is B), set the brush size to 20 in the options bar on the right, and then apply green highlight at the junction of the sky and the trees in the image .

The smearing must run through the entire image without leaving any breaks; for more complex edges, you can smear more heavily; in addition, be careful not to ignore the small patches of sky exposed in the gaps between the trees; for areas where there is too much smearing, you can use an eraser tool (shortcut E) to erase it. After the painting is completed, select the fill tool (the shortcut key is G) and click to fill the part of the image that needs to be retained, that is, the part where the girl is, with transparent blue. Set Smoothness to 2 in the options bar and press the OK button. We see that the white background of the image has become transparent, which means that the foreground part has been "extracted" by us.

2. Make a blue sky. On the layer palette, we noticed that the original background layer has become a normal layer "Layer 0", which we named "Foreground". Hold down the Ctrl key and click the "Create New Layer" button at the bottom of the palette, create a new layer under the "Foreground" layer, and name it "Blue Sky". Click the foreground color block on the toolbar, and in the pop-up color picker dialog box, set the foreground color to blue with color values ​​​​of R50, G110, and B210. Then use the same method to set the background color to the light blue of R120, G180, and B250. Select the Gradient Tool (the shortcut key is G), select the gradient from the foreground color to the background color in the Gradient Color Picker on the Options Bar, then click above the transparent area in the image and drag diagonally downward until Above the trees, you get a blue gradient sky.

3. Make white clouds. The sky now is too pure and looks too fake. Let’s embellish it with a few white clouds. Press the D key to return the foreground and background colors to the default black and white. On the Channels palette, click the Create New Channel button to create a new channel Alpha 1. Hold down the Alt key and select the menu command "Filter→Render→Layered Clouds" by holding down the Alt key while clicking the left mouse button and dragging on the menu until you release on the desired menu item. The result of executing this command is to create a highly contrasting cloud-like effect within the channel.

4. Hold down the Ctrl key and click on channel Alpha 1 to load the white part of the channel as a selection. Go back to the Layers palette, create a new layer between the "Blue Sky" and "Foreground" layers, and name it "White Clouds". Then press the Ctrl+BackSpace keys and fill the selection with white as the background color, thus adding patches of white clouds to the blue sky. Then press Ctrl+D to deselect.

5. Final adjustment If you feel that there are too many white clouds, which are a bit overwhelming, or the clouds in a certain area feel bad, you can select the eraser tool (the shortcut key is E) and select a soft-angle brush with a larger size (such as 100) on the option bar. , adjust the opacity to about 80%, confirm that the current layer is "white clouds", then click and smudge on the image to erase the redundant and unpleasant white clouds. Finally, we got a beautiful photo under the blue sky and white clouds.