Wow.... I am still using CC2019 as I didn't like the look or feel of CC2020. :O I guess I better upgrade to 2021 so I can add some hair to all of my selfies....
Sky replacement in photoshop
- Thread starter Jameel Hyder
- Start date
Jim, I am sure that you have noticed that light on the mountain occurs shortly after the cloud color in many cases. Having both at the same time is actually rare for me. I have blended the two images in the past, maybe 2-5 minutes apart.
On another note, this post made me recall that for most of my film shooting, I used Kodachrome 25. You sent the roll to the developers and got it back exactly as shot and showed the slide the same way. Not a lick of manipulation. Cibachrome was way too expensive so no prints in those days for me. Louse DR too, but fabulous color.
Given the way ACR allows you to do masking, it is actually lot easier now to process different parts of the image differently and the need to process the same raw file two different ways and merge no longer exists. That said if one wants to do that, you can use the raw processed for the sky as a sky image and use that to do sky replacement.
Hey Ben, I agree with Slides I would do the same. The thing with slides is they seemed to be more vibrant and had more detail anyway. I am sure that is due to the light displaying them on a projector screen in a dark room. So for me by default, slides didn't need much help.
Now film was another story. I did my own film and had my own darkroom so I could push the negs, and play with the neg on the enlarger. Changing up the chemicals and how long the Negs were in each bath would also change up the Neg and how it looked. Much as Ansel Adams. What interesting with Ansel is some of his prints didn't hardly resemble the Negs they were printed off at all. He would change that much when enlarging.
I still do it the old fashioned way sometimes with dual processing the Raw. I think ACR can be more powerful since it's still operating on the raw image then in Photoshop. So I would say perhaps 25% of my shots I Dual Process.
But yeah, I will often just do it off of 1 conversion in ACR. Part of that is due to ACR I think having been improved so much through the years.
Peano
Member
(I'm late to the party, but this is an important issue.) Yes, and people will often differ on ethical questions regarding the real vs. the manipulated in photography. Where people do differ, it's important to establish the context.
If you're a photojournalist, for instance, you are ethically required to faithfully report the facts of whatever story you're covering. The same for forensic photography. If you're taking photos of a traffic accident to be used as evidence in court, you are ethically and legally prohibited from altering any facts relevant to the case at hand.
But in a public forum where anyone can post landscape photos, the lines aren't so clearly drawn. Is there a reasonable expectation that photos have not been manipulated (e.g. with a sky replacement)? If you say yes, that raises the question of who establishes that expectation. If the forum owner posts a rule prohibiting manipulated photos, that's one thing. But if it's the subjective expectations of individual viewers, that's quite different. Ethics doesn't require us to be uniform in our individual expectations and preferences.
Consider the analogy of a landscape painter. An artist sets up his easel and paints the landscape before him. Is he ethically required to faithfully reproduce what he sees? Or does he have artistic license to add trees that don't exist? May he paint in clouds that aren’t there? Is he allowed to omit an unsightly object marring an otherwise beautiful scene?
Again, the answers depend on the context. If he is painting a picture on his own to hang on his wall or offer for sale, that's one thing. He can paint whatever he pleases. But if he was hired by the landowner to paint a faithful representation of the land, then he's more like a photojournalist. He has a duty not to fake it.
In short: Before you come down squarely on one side or the other on an ethical question regarding photo manipulation, be sure you are clear about the context in which the question is being raised.
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AlanLichty
Moderator
The landscape painter has the nice option of choosing which lighting to include in his/her rendering of the scene. It's a given the light that was present when they started wasn't the same by the time they finished.
Peano
Member
So does the photographer -- if he knows his stuff in Photoshop (which is how I created this sunset lighting)!
AlanLichty
Moderator
Yup - nice result BTW.So does the photographer -- if he knows his stuff in Photoshop (which is how I created this sunset lighting)!
Wow Peano! That's a pretty realistic looking replacement.So does the photographer -- if he knows his stuff in Photoshop (which is how I created this sunset lighting)!
Peano
Member
Thank you! Not to split hairs, but I would call it a conversion rather than a replacement. At top left, for instance, you can see that the original clouds remained. I didn't replace the sky, just changed its color and luminance. Pretty much the same elsewhere in the image: same objects, but different colors and luminance values.
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EDIT June 7 '23: For anyone interested in the techniques I used for this conversion, I have a post on that at dprevived.com.
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AlanLichty
Moderator
Topaz used to sell a tool called ReStyle that could do some pretty amazing things with the color maps of an image. Very handy for edits like the one you showed for Venice. Not sure why they abandoned it because it was really handy for days when Mother Nature doesn't cooperate for nice sunrise/sunset colors.