The best way to learn anything is to do it, and then practice, practice, practice!

 

My wise old grandmother, she with the first grade public school education but a Ph.D. from the School of Hard Knocks, told me that the best way to learn anything is to do it, and then practice, practice, practice.

Over at YouTube, I found a pretty good video of how to replace skies using Photoshop. Go have a look at it because it’s helped me tremendously. Still frustrating — but down to just one beer per session….

Remembering my wise old grandmother’s WWW (Wise Words of Wisdom), I’ve been exploring all the various functions while replacing that sky using this picture of an unknown bird (Avian101?):

 

I loved the way the bird was perched there but the background, oh that dastardly background.

After playing around in Photoshop, I came up with this:

 

What I did was take the following picture of a cloudy sky,

 

…apply a Gaussian blur to it and then insert it as the background of the picture. I had a hard time finding just the right blur to look realistic and using all the selection tools to let the sky mask out the parts of the bird picture that I didn’t want.

My main problem was finding a cloud picture that was dark enough to be pretty but light enough so that I didn’t get the halo/ghosting effect around the bird. My next goal is to learn how to use the Refine Edge, Feathering, Smoothing, and other controls to prevent that halo/ghosting effect regardless of the pictures I use.

 

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