Brightening a grey day

[ejdv]

Hi,

I made this photo of the Russian Concorde (TU-144 or Konkordski), but the sky is rather grey.

http://www.ej-creations.com/pse6/TU-144.jpg

http://www.ej-creations.com/pse6/TU-144.psd

I tried to isolate the sky using different techniques in order to replace it with a brighter sky but did not succeed.

All selection tutorials always have a rather easy object to select, but in this case the grey sky and white color of the plane are making it difficult.

I am using PSE6.

Anyone that knows which tricks to use and who cares to share it with me (and the other forum members) ??

Thanks in advance,

Erik

[gcherry]

Something like this? (Note: this was a quickie so it's not quite as clean as it should be.)

First, I brightened the image (using a levels adjustment, then merged the layer down). I then used the magic wand tool with the tolerance set to 10 and contiguous set on. Hold down the shift key while clicking to add to the selection. When I had most of the sky, I used the selection brush tool to refine the areas around the plane. I copied the sky selection to another layer. Then I brought in sky from another picture, placed the new sky layer above the old one and created a clipping mask (To create a clipping mask, place your cursor on the line between the two layers, hold down the alt key and click when you see a little symbol that looks like a black circle on top of a white circle.)

[frank abramonte]

Erik, you can use the magic wand with a low tolerance to select the sky.
Adjust the tolerance as needed. Additional work can be done with a white brush.
find a suitable sky by searching sky and clouds.
Select the sky and go to Edit>Copy
Then go to the plane photos and select the sky and go to Edit>Paste Into.
Adjust (enlarge and/or reduce) the sky to fit the area by going to Image>Image Size>Scale

[ejdv]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll give it a try.
Holding the shift key while selecting is a good tip, didn't know that.