#CLOUD OVERLAY PRO#

It’s ok, though, I just used a brush or the pen tool to make a selection and mask those parts away. You can see there are parts of the scarf, hand, and hat that ended up blending into the sky layer. You’ll still have to do some masking, but for the most part, Blend If saves so much time. Then you use the sliders to manipulate which areas of your top layer (the cloud layer) will blend with the bottom layer. You basically go the bottom of the blending options dialog box and choose “Blend if GRAY”. I’ll post links at the end of the article. There are some in-depth videos for using this technique in the workshop section of this website. Since my skyline is pretty simple, I used the “blend-if” technique to mask out the parts of the sky that I don’t want to show. Next, I right clicked on the cloud layer, and this dialog box comes up. Then lined up the horizon lines by moving the cloud layer up. I lowered the opacity of the cloud layer so I could see the horizon line on both images. I eventually settled on the above image and placed it on its own layer above my original photo in Photoshop. To find the best cloud image, I scrolled through the cloud pack folders looking for something that matched the focal length my original images was shot at (24mm) and just started opening up a few in Photoshop and trying them out. But to fit my vision for the little witch, I wanted something darker and stormier looking. The sky in my original image is actually quite beautiful.

Within each of those folders, the images are organized by focal length, which is very important! As previously mentioned, I’ve never tried any other cloud images, but I found this organizational method to be very helpful in choosing the right photo for my particular needs. SLR Lounge has cleverly organized the cloud images in the following categories: Daytime, Daytime Sun Direction, Mostly Cloudy, Sunset No Sun, and Sunset Sun Direction. I have the cloud pack loaded into a collection in Lightroom. Next up, I had to choose the right image from the SLR Lounge Cloud Pack for my composite. Read more about using the clone stamp tool by clicking here. The key to cloning textures so they look “real” is to make sure you’re not seeing patterns anywhere within the texture. You can see here that the sand has a weird pattern look from the rotation, so I used some careful cloning to disguise that. I chose to do the latter because I didn’t want to crop in too tightly to the feet. You can either crop out the parts of the image that are showing some of the original behind it, or you can merge the two layers and then do a little cloning to preserve more of the background. Then I mouse over a corner of the image and rotate it until the horizon line is straight. I do this the old fashioned way by dragging a line down from the rulers, hitting command-T, and dragging the little center axis marker over to the edge of the line. Next, I copied my layer and straightened the horizon line. In a few quick and easy clicks, my image was ready to go. When I got home, I loaded the photos into Adobe Lightroom, chose a favorite and applied the basic color, contrast and other adjustments I usually make using the SLR Lounge Lightroom Preset System. It was cold (like super cold) and wet, so she didn’t last long, but we got some shots I could play with. SLR Lounge Photoshop Paper Texture Collection Getting Startedįirst things first, you’ll need to take your photograph! I wanted to do something cute and fun with my daughter, so we grabbed a bunch of props and headed out to the lake in my neighborhood.

#CLOUD OVERLAY PRO#

Graphics Tablet & Pen (I use a Wacom Intuos Pro Medium)

Cloud overlay