Affinity Photo - How to replace a Sky

Key Takeaways

hello my friends and welcome to another episode of affinity photo tutorials today we are gonna look at how to replace a sky in a photo so this is our end result and this is our starting picture as you can see it's a foggy rainy day and one thing I want to point out before we start to use the technique is it is a easy and fast technique but it only works for some of the pictures so you want to have a picture where the sky is very uniform there's not much going on in the sky the sky has to be foggy but the background the foreground should be as clear as possible and the horizon should be obstructed by other stuff so you don't see it directly so it gives you the nicest result also you want to have a sky where when you took the picture the Sun was not behind you because otherwise it wouldn't work out because now the Sun is in front of you and the shadows would not work with this new Sun position so have a look out for that I already prepared the picture and I already prepared the sky I like to have the sky in a higher resolution which gives me the ability to move it around rescale it and fit it into the picture where I think it fits best so let's get started the first thing we want to do is to create a mask layer for the sky which is very easy with affinity photo the only thing we have to do is to click on the selection brush make sure that you are on the layer with the sky and that we want to mask so just draw this in here very crudely so you see we have a selection here like this and then we click on refine and basically affinity photo is going to do the work for us as you can see it's not perfect yet we just have to take a brush again inside of the refine selection and select everything where the background sky is looking through there we go and we give basically affinity another chance to recalculate the selection let's see how this turns out takes a little bit but affinity photo is doing a really great job and saving you a lot of time so you see it's almost perfect selection maybe go down here a little bit more there we go this looks pretty good we click on apply and then we can strt strg + D to deselect no that was not that was wrong sorry we have to click on the mask layer first so there's the mask layer now strg + D there we go and now we click on the layers and pull out the mask layer below the original layer because we don't need it for this layer we need it for the sky layer let's click on the sky layer and rename its sky and then right click on the sky layer and make a duplicate and then we click and rename it grounds because we have a wet road and this means we have a sky reflection in the road okay let's press sthe + 0 to resize the picture so we see everything and activates the sky layer and see where we want to put it we want to put it roughly on on the wrong layer again sky layer roughly on the horizon so maybe here is good where it hits the road maybe bits a bit higher up maybe here looks to be good ok and then we take the ground layer select the ground layer click on arrange and click on flip vertically flip vertically there we go so it's upside down and these green lines guide you so it's really at the same position we just changed the height of the location so we connect them down here there we go maybe put it a little bit higher with our arrow keys there we go very nice and now let's hide the ground layer again click on the sky layer and then click on the mask layer and push it up onto the sky layer so the mask works for the sky layer and you can see it's a very nice selection already the next thing we want to do is click on the sky layer again and click on multiply so it is mixing with the backgrounds of the picture ok the next thing we want to do is turn on the ground layer again and this time we don't set it to multiply we set it to overlay so it's a bit more fleshy from the color and we need to create a mask layer for this too so hide it again and click on the background with our original picture and then we go again to the selection brush and make it a bit smaller maybe there we go and we select a little bit of the wet parts or of the shiny parts of the road then we go again into refine and now we can do it more roughly to give it a second chance because the first part is defining what is the background and the second part is giving affinity the chance to make a better finer selection so let's see how this turns out as looks very good maybe try it back here also yes I'm really happy with that let's click on apply again and then we click on mask layer again and we pull out the mask layer and we pull it onto the ground layer there we go make the ground layer visible and now sthe + D to deselect it and I want let's click the mask layer and we click on layer and invert so it's not on the on the on these parts but it is on the darker parts of the road and we will go and click the ground layer and reduce its opacity until we feel yeah that looks like a good sort of reflection for the ground what you see here is something we don't want to have the coloring on the side and the forest so we just click on the mask layer and then we click on the paintbrush and give it a give it a good size and zero hardness so it's very soft on the edges set it to black and then just roughly paint out the side areas of the road so we hide them carefully there we go that's good enough okay so one thing we need to do now is to create an ambient light layer ambient light is the light that is not coming directly from a source but it's reflective from the ground and the surround and picks up the color of the surroundings so what we want to do is we click on the rectangle tool down here and just draw it rectangle over all of the picture pushes up here and then we go to the sky layer to the mask right click and say duplicate and then we pull it up to reserve to the rectangle and now what we do is we click on the mask and say layer invert so everything is affected by the ambient light but the sky okay so the next thing we want to do is to do we want to multiply its soft light soft light is better so yes we put it to soft light and with opacity again you can adjust where you think it's a good situation for the for the for the ambient light maybe it's 95 percent looks kind of okay and I'm just to set the color of the ambient light and you just click on the move tool click on the layer and then up here you have a fill and with this you can you have this little circle here you can drag it into the picture and select a color that you like and then click again on it so it will jump to this color and now you see the ambient light has changed a little bit so you can really play around and find a color where you think this looks best I think this reflection is a bit too hard so let's zoom in a little bit and click on the mask of the ground and take our brush and let's see yes the black color maybe reduce the opacity to make it not too intense make it a bit smaller and let's see let's draw a little bit on here yeah that's that's better okay that's good another thing that you can do if you want is create a new layer pull it up to the top and take the brush again make it a fairly big size zoom out of the picture so you have a good overview take the brush again and set it to black of course make the brush even bigger like a really big size really big there we go that's good okay and now what we can do is we just let's see there are a little bit of a circle down here maybe a little bit up here and there okay sthe zero again to resize it and we can let's see that's let's take hard light looks pretty good what is soft light let's see soft light soft light looks good and again you can set how much of an effect you want to have to give it a little bit more because the light of course with the distance to the sky the light is falling off so it's getting the reflections getting less intense so you want this element this part in the lower part of the picture a little bit darker okay one more thing you can do of course is you click here on the adjustment layers and click on curve make sure that this is on the top above all other layers and then you can play around with the settings here and find out what kind of brightness you want to have and even contrast if you pull these in a little bit you see it gives you more contrast and you can make it of course well to your tastes let's say to your taste whatever you feel looks good so you can make it really how can it's a postcard a little bit cheesy maybe or more natural it's really up to you and to your taste what kind of result you're looking for so that's it this is our finished design of course you can play around with all the different elements and finds something that suits you best and your taste best everybody's taste is very different some like very intense colors and very dreamy skies other people like it more softer more natural and of course you can work with the details a lot and put in a lot of things that you want to have there maybe even put in some artificial fog or some artificial shadows and light so as a lot of possibilities to do different things it's up to your taste experiment don't be afraid of making errors because if you do errors it's really the best way to learn something about your art and about your design and maybe you'll find some techniques that are even better than doing it correctly doing it the right way ok so that's it and I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and yeah give me some feedback suggest new other topics that you want to see questions that you have about doing things in affinity photo and thanks you for watching please leave a like please subscribe to see the further episodes that are coming and yeah thank you for being a great audience see you soon goodbye have a nice day [Music]