Step 10: Paint Over The Areas You Want To Protect The Tools palette showing black as our current Foreground color. I want a fairly narrow transition area, so I'm going to click just above the trees to begin my gradient and then drag a short ways down until I'm just below the trees: The area between where you started dragging and where you stopped dragging will become the visible transition area between the darker areas at the top of the photo and the lighter areas on the bottom. Hold down your Shift key as you drag if you want to make sure you're dragging straight down and not on an angle.

Make sure you have 'Layer 1' selected in the Layers palette, then click somewhere in the sky portion of the photo and drag straight down until you're below the sky.

With the Foreground to Transparent gradient selected, we're going to create our own version of a neutral density filter by simply dragging out a black-to-transparent gradient inside the photo. Step 5: Drag Out A Gradient Inside The Photo Select the 'Foreground to Transparent' gradient from the Gradient Picker.Ĭlick anywhere inside the photo to exit out of the Gradient Picker when you're done. Since I always bring my camera along everywhere I go (I find it makes it easier to take pictures), I couldn't resist pulling the car over and snapping a few photos. I was out driving around the countryside one morning when I came across a couple of horses proudly standing by the road enjoying a delicious helping of grass. In fact, even though the general rule is to get things right as much as possible in front of the camera rather than relying on Photoshop to save the day, this is one time when I find it easier to do the work in Photoshop since it gives us a lot more control over the end result. Photoshop makes it easy to achieve the same results with very little effort. If you don't happen to own a neutral density filter or forgot to bring it with you, no worries. Since the top portion of the filter is darker than the bottom portion, less light is able to enter the top portion of the lens, protecting the sky from overexposure. The usual way of avoiding this problem is by using a neutral density filter, which is a fancy name for what is essentially a black-to-transparent gradient attached to the lens of your camera, fading from black at the top down to transparent at the bottom. Often times when taking pictures outdoors, the camera exposes the shot based on the brightness of the subject you're focusing on, which is fine except that it tends to overexpose the sky, washing away that rich, deep blue along with most of the details in the clouds. In this Photoshop tutorial, we'll learn how to enhance the sky in a photo, bringing out details in the clouds, improving the contrast and increasing color saturation, and we can do all these things at once using a very simple technique.

How to add sky overlay in photoshop