Imaging technique - Replacing Skys

I just used a few of my old photos and chucked some new skys in there. It was alot harder than i thought and had a fair bit to it.

Sometimes as a commercial photographer you may be asked to take a landscape shot and usually this requires having an amazing sky for a more dramatic effect so this is how you do it.

Fist you select the sky using whatever feels most comfortable to you, here i have used the quick section tool then masked it and fixed it up a bit using brushes.

Then you put in the extra sky as a smart object so you can warp it to however you like.

Then using your selection mask over the new sky this should slightly put in a new sky but it looks very bad at this time.

We then use Gaussian blur on the mask to get rid of the halos.

We then create a few curves adjustment layers to the sky and the foreground to make the sky and foreground look similar. We also use curves to create a polarising effect on the sky and using a gradient on the mask.

We then make another curves adjustment layer fill the mask black and use radial gradient on the mask to simulate light coming over the hills and whatever would be happening in the shot.