How to prepare photos to use in PS Sky Replacement

[GoldingD]

This is not about how to use the PS Sky Replacement

This is not about how to Import an Image to add to Get More Skys

This is about prepping personal image of Landscapes with Skys, before Importing them Into the PS Skys.

Does anyone know of an Adobe or third-party document on that?

Say you have a Landscape Photo, a nice sky to use, but the Mtn, Trees, etc. are not part of the sky. Now I could ignore the bit below the sky, but could that not get in the way. Should I cut that out? Delete a selection and leave as transparent? Fill in with gray? Fill in with sky blue? Accomplish some content aware fill (but not the entire bottom?) ,etc. Oh, or perhaps just crop as to keep only the sky (perhaps with a bit of content aware on the bottom)

A concern is the bits that are not sky may bleed thru in the Sky Replacement. Fairly sure I noticed that in some of the PS included sky's.

For example, this Landscape:

Could create a duplicate layer, select and delete much of the non sky, then content aware fill the bit left over as to create a nice clean break:

Or do you go all the way and crop out the empty space?

Or something completely different?

[Myra Ferguson]

I tried your image with Sky Replacement (Edit > Sky Replacement...), and Photoshop did a good job of identifying the sky and masking out the landscape.

 

My recommendation would be to test your image with Sky Replacement. Then, if you see any issues with content that doesn't get masked that well, load the selection from the layer mask and while you have a selection tool selected, click on Select and Mask... in the Options bar to refine the mask.

[GoldingD]

Thing is, I am asking about the other way around. Using my sky in PS to replace the sky in a another photograph. 

[Myra Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Oh, thank you for the clarification.

In this case, I would recommend using Select Sky (Select > Sky) to select your sky, invert the selection (Select > Inverse), expand the selection (Select > Modify > Expand), and use the Contextual Task Bar (Window > Contextual Task Bar) with a prompt like "more sky" to have Photoshop fill the rest of the canvas with sky that blends in with what is in your image.

[GoldingD]

"more sky" would be a generative fill?

[Myra Ferguson]

Yes, it's generative fill. If you want to give it a more specific prompt, you can.

[D Fosse]

Just crop it out, that's what I did.  You'll have to store them separately from the originals anyway, so you can basically do whatever you want to them.

[Trevor.Dennis]

We get some interesting skies in New Zealand, so I have been collecting them when out with my wee dog.  I like to have at least 4000 pixels wide, and to get as much height as I can.  So I start with a best case crop and use a combination of Free Transform > Warp and Content Aware Fill to take out what's left of the foreground after cropping.

Having said that, they mostly work just fine with out any prep or cropping, and even when you get a bit of errant foreground, Sky Replacement's layer make up makes it easy to fix, so prepping images for Sky Replacement as more to do with the OCD content creators tend to suffer from, as necessity.