Help please, blending 2 photos, tress on the horizon

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The Boz

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Hi,
I'm very new to photoshop but have gained a basic understanding from online tutorials and a lot of messing about.
What I'm trying, and failing, to do is blend 2 photos together. I have a landscape shot I really like but the sky was completely gray and monotonous. So what I've tried to do is pinch the sky from another shot where it's more dramatic and merge the 2 together.

I used the background eraser tool to remove the gray sky, and them put the decent sky underneath it in a separate layer. The problem is there's loads of trees on the horizon and the eraser tool hasn't done a very good job. It's quite obvious that something's gone on across the horizon. It was even more noticeable before I went monochrome.

Now there must be a better way of doing this but I can find anything online (trust me I've looked hard ha ha). Here's the shot so you can see what I mean.


Locks 2 by LeonJB, on Flickr

Cheers guys
 
It doesn't look that bad, tbh. :)

Rather than erasing the sky and putting the layer underneath, when I'm replacing sky's I tend to put the sky layer on top and use a layer mask to paint the sky I want over the image... its a bit easier to see how its blending, and I can lower the opacity and use soft edged brushes when it comes into contact with other stuff so there is less of that sudden change going on.
 
Hi,
Thanks for your advice. I've tried this method too but it gives me the same problems when I have trees on the horizon. It's a nightmare trying to paint around each branch and even then it doesn't seem to give very good results.

The refine edge tool is very hit and miss (at least when I'm using it ha ha), and sometimes works ok but other times it's miles worse.

I was just thinking that with the ridiculously large array of tools and techniques in photoshop there'd be a way of accurately selecting/masking the sky around the branches without attempting it manually "Microsoft paint style", if you know what I mean
 
Yeah, the selection tools can be a bit hit and miss for fiddly bits (it usually hair in my photos) even if i magic wand it, i usually have to correct bits myself which can be quite painstaking.
 
So it's a case of manually painting over every branch then? Jeez that's some work is that.

It's funny that you say about hair, just last week I took a cracking portrait of my girlfriend and I was trying to selective sharpen her, and it was a nightmare getting the tiny stray hairs selected. I gave up in the end and just left them bits unsharpened. The refine edge tool did work quite well for that tho, still couldnt every hair though
 
Don't forget that you can change the blend mode (can't remember offhand which does which but some modes only replace the lights, the others only the darks) and that the layer mask doesn't have to be black/white. It has 255 levels of blending (from nothing through to full). It's times like this when a pressure sensitive tablet is very useful...
 
When they have leaves on it is even worse!;)

You could try this method it works with some images but not all.

Open your image then add your sky as layer just over the blank area.

Then go to layer > blending modes and play with the bottom slider to get a decent result.

Next add a curves adjustment layer as a clipping layer and tweek the contrast of the sky area.

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My favourite home made way is to duplicate the background layer and then make a mask out of it then pretty much as before. but here I used Elements.

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Wow Paul thanks very much. I didn't know about the blending options, this is exactly what I was looking for. I knew there'd be a way without having to paint every branch.

You've also given me something else to learn about and utilise: clipping masks. That's a very neat way of making a curves adjustment to the sky only and i'll be using those again!

Check out mk II, not an astounding improvement but it's certainly better, and it's the method I'll use from now on


Locks 2 by LeonJB, on Flickr

By the way the editing in your second pic is incredible, nobody could tell that sky isn't real, very neat job!
 
The right hand side of the tree near the centre is miles better. Thanks again
 
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