For example, placing clouds from a sunset on top of a noon-day photo is difficult to do without it looking unnatural.Īlso, try your best to match the “weather” of a scene. Pay attention to the approximate time of the day your images were captured, because it is very difficult to seamlessly combine images from completely different parts of the day.

Try to match source and target images roughly in these four categories: If you have a beautiful stock image of a sky that was photographed at 24mm or 16mm, it may look out of place if you try to put it on a telephoto image, shot at 85mm or greater. If your primary image doesn’t have a clear horizon, you have a lot more wiggle room in selecting the clouds you would like to use.Īnother thing to pay attention to is the approximate focal lengths of the images that are being combined. We’ve provided all of our Cloud Pack images with horizons present within the image so that this is possible with any scene you choose to integrate into your own. One thing that is rarely mentioned in other Photoshop tutorials is that it is preferable to make the horizons in both images line up with each other. So, when you are merging a beautiful, cloud-filled sky with your foreground, always remember to adjust each source layer for color, tone, and contrast separately (we will explore this further in the following tutorials). Even the most subtle differences in color, brightness, or contrast will make your final image look unnatural. Match The Mood And Post ProcessingĪnytime you combine two photos, the post-processing needs to match as closely as possible. Follow them and you’ll be off to a great start every single time you begin to blend your images together.

When adding clouds to a scene, we have five tips that will be helpful for you to keep in mind in order to create seamless, natural looking images.

Part 1 | Tips for Adding Realistic Clouds with Photoshop

We’ll then teach you how to Insert Clouds with Basic Layer Masking. In this 2 part tutorial, we’ll first review some Tips for Adding Realistic Clouds with Photoshop. This tutorial is for the SLR Lounge Cloud Pack, a collection of over 400 cloud images designed to help photographers add interest to the skies of their images.

Photoshop brush cloud