Adding in to sky - Best way to do it?

[CaPpedDoG]

Hey everyone, I'm adding a different sky into a photo of mine. I copied the new sky onto its own layer and created a layer mask. I've been painting in the new sky but it's taking some time because there are a lot of intricacies between with the blades of grass. Is there a more efficient way to do this? Cheers

 

[Rich54]

There are several ways of doing this, but if there happens to be good contrast between the foreground and the sky---which your photo has---then there is a setting called Blend-If that works very well for this kind of thing. This video is pretty good, and you can find others by searching for Photoshop Blend-If tutorials.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJssJWZ2t_Y

 

[CaPpedDoG]

Big thanks!! That worked perfectly and saved me a bunch of time

 

[Tom Mann]

For future reference, using BlendIF on one of the R, G, B channels often works even better than using it on the combined RGB channel. It's a great combination of one of the other standard masking techniques, "masking by channels" and the BlendIF technique.

Cheers,

Tom M