Photoshop Compositing Tutorial 1 - Layer Masks

Hey guys, this is Macazoo One, and today we're going to be doing a tutorial on how to kind of replace this sky with this guy. This is a nice picture, of course, but, uh, it's kind of boring. There's just a bunch of sand here, so I like this kind of gravel and grass over here more.

So, we're gonna be using Photoshop today. I'm gonna copy this image and just make a new file with the clipboard dimensions. So after pasting it in, we'll start the process of cutting out the sky. For this, the easiest way to do this, and because it's pretty much one color, you can just use the magic wand tool. That'll do a pretty good selection of what we want.

But to clean up the edges a bit, we're gonna use the quick selection tool, which is in the same toolbox. We're just gonna kind of drag around the edges where it doesn't look very clean. And, uh, so there it's selected properly. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use the create layer mask tool.

What this is going to do is it's going to cut out this area and kind of delete the bottom area, just because this is selected. The reason why I'm doing it like this is because I'll be able to change it later. So right now, this is not what we want, but we can easily select this layer mask. As you can see, it's white and black.

We can just hit Command I to invert the colors. What that's going to do is it's going to invert essentially the sky and select only this bottom area. So this is very useful because you can just create a layer mask and go back to it later. You can even select the layer mask, disable it, and add mask to selection, which basically just selects that area.

The next part, of course, is we're gonna drop in the other sky. I'm gonna copy this and it's gonna be on top. I'm just gonna drag it to the bottom and scale it—that's a Command T. Once you've got it scaled to a nice size, I mean, it looks pretty good, but I think we're going to do a bit of editing here.

Because, of course, we used a vector layer mask, or a non-destructive mask, we can actually change and feather the border between the sky and the water. Because right now, it looks a bit kind of unnatural. We're going to feather a little bit. So to do that, there's two ways you could do this. One is using the blur tool and going into this layer mask and blurring the edges.

But because that's a bit slow, instead I'm going to use the eraser tool. What this is going to let me do is, if I just turn the... get a nice brush size, keep the hardness down to zero, I'll be able to just kind of smooth this out. Make it kind of, uh, maybe a little bit jagged, not so straight, so it looks more like a realistic horizon.

So, that looks pretty good, but I think something's still missing. And, uh, that's what we're gonna do in the next video. We're gonna be talking about color correction and making sure that the colors fit with this. So this looks pretty good, but again, if you can see the blue over here looks... it doesn't compare to the blue of the bottom, and the clouds are way too white.

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