Help - blown out sky!

[Bren1]

I need some help. I am new to Photoshop and am struggling with a photo of my son's flag football team. The sky is totally blown out. I know (hope) it can be fixed. Help! I need to give each teammember a 5x7 of the photo. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

http://www.kaneva.com/asset/42638.storeItem

[Bren1]

This is Bren again.....I also need guidance on a good webhosting site to download photos that I want to ask questions about on this forum. I don't know how I got to Kaneva.com ....I just wanted to be able to get the photo attached with my posting.

[Wendy]

Hi Bren ...

... and welcome to the forum :)

Most of us use Pixentral ... http://www.pixentral.com/index.php

For the sky in the image you posted just take a look in the Subscriber area>Tutorials and you will see a tutorial showing you how to replace a sky using an adjustment layer :)

Wendy

[TonyW]

Bren we normally use Pixentral and size to about 800 pixels wide. On your blown out sky it looks like it needs to be replaced - just select the sky area, delete it and put a new sky in the layer underneath. You could also use a layer mask which would give you some more control at the edges of the new and old. I did a quick select delete replace and it looked like this:

http://www.pixentral.com/hosted/1fYOrUaZtEuMvykLmUlODpdpGmLsN1_thumb.jpg (http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1fYOrUaZtEuMvykLmUlODpdpGmLsN1)

Tony

[Rusty]

Bren,

The blowout actually makes it easy! The sky is so uniformly white, the magic selection wand catches most of it. I used another selection tool to catch the bits and pieces around the heads.

What you want to do is duplicate your background layer.
Then select the sky and, after cleanup, Edit>Delete
That gives you a layer of everything except the sky

I keep a file of images in a folder named "Sky" (yeah, very original)
Scroll thru that and find one that looks OK - open that file.

Then, copy that file into your 'team picture' file. It will come in as a new layer which you want to position above the Background and below the Background-copy with the sky deleted.

Voila - you now have a sky :)

http://www.pixentral.com/hosted/1rfjApQU0Ovf2q4DI4G1cY96PEI1Ql_thumb.jpg (http://www.pixentral.com/show.php?picture=1rfjApQU0Ovf2q4DI4G1cY96PEI1Ql)

I did this pretty quick-and-dirty. The more time you spend on the 'selection' to get rid of the blown out sky, and keep what you want, the better will be your results.

Welcome to the forum - every body here will help you. I am so new, I'm thrilled to be able to help somebody :) :)

Rusty

[Rusty]

Tony - you always help me so I know you are better than I am. You are also a LOT faster :)

Bren - see what I mean, the folks here all help!

Rusty

[GaryK]

I had a quick go with just a blue gradiant, but you guys got the clouds in so no post from me.

I gotta get some more sky shots.:D

Great job guys.

[TonyW]

Tony - you always help me so I know you are better than I am. You are also a LOT faster :)

Bren - see what I mean, the folks here all help!

Rusty

Rusty: I cheated and used the magic extractor. I've been discovering recently that's it really does do quite a good job and it is quick :) . It isn't that magic though and I can see the mistakes it made that I didn't bother to fix. And funnily enough I was just tagging my latest sky selection when this question came up so I had a new sky sitting right there.

Tony

[Rusty]

Tony,
Although I upgraded from PSE3 to PSE5 I have not yet attempted the magic extractor. I was scared off by negative comments in a number of posts but, now that I think about it, I'm probably confusing the magic extractor with the magic selection brush. On the basis of your comments, I'd better give it a try.

Rusty

[Bren1]

Thanks! I appreciate your help. I have learned a lot on this website and must say that it is a bit addicting.

TonyW - any chance of sharing the background so I can edit the photo myself?

Thanks again! Bren

[NYBOB1]

Bren,you can get all kinds of sky backgrounds here:http://www.morguefile.com/archive/index.php?display=88137

& http://www.morguefile.com/archive/index.php?display=88437

Bob

[graficalicus]

I just made a selection of the sky,
created a new layer from it,
ran Filters>Render>Clouds (default B&W forground-background colors)
added a solid color sky blue adjustment layer and tweaked the opacity,
added a mask to the sky layer using the sky selection
used transform - perspective on the clouds layer to make them fade away to the distance:

(zipped-up .psd file is here (http://www.graficalicus.com/boards/Flagfootball.zip) - it'll 'splain better. A picture is worth a thousand words & all ...)

[douglas m scott]

more free sky pictures

http://pics.skygaze.com/blue.shtml