Add your own clouds

[firesuite]

So i was talking on another thread about living down here in southern California and about how there never seems to be any clouds in the sky this time of year (yea i know hard life huh!), but from a photography point of view and especially for me doing landscape shots this can be a problem. The shot below was shot while away on vacation in Santa Barbara.

So i thought i would add my own in photoshop using another image for the clouds. does anyone think its any good ? believable ?

before...
http://www.firesuite.com/images/misc/sb.jpg

and after..
http://www.firesuite.com/images/misc/sb_clouds.jpg

Graham

[joosay]

Looks believable to me! Nice job.

[Tigerkn]

Looks believable to me! Nice job.
^ +1
Please share the technique.

[john-in-japan]

Looks great!
John

[ckckevin]

wow! this is so amazing. How did you do that?

[DerekSimon]

Realistic to a degree but really not my preference. I would rather try to capture it when it was real, maybe its just me.

[tupper]

You can borrow some clouds from Jakarta.. always cloudy here.

[crashthenet44]

Good job.

[jetcode]

the original sky would make a nice background or element in a web or graphics application

[OdiN1701]

Looks believable, but the photo is lacking interest. If the only interest in the photo is added by putting a different photo in, look for something better to shoot.

[firesuite]

I may have missed things out from my first post on this, the point to this topic is that I was away on vacation so this is not somewhere i get to go on a regular basis. So what i thought I would do is grab the shot I need and add something in the sky in later, being as im not going back there for some time to come. The sky looked great all day and there was some lovely cloudscapes but as soon as the sun started setting they all disappeared .

As for the technique its not much really, I just separated the ground and sky in photoshop, added the new cloud layer and blended it with 'Soft Light' i think. one of the lower blend modes anyway.

[CosmoKid]

i really like what you did with the clouds. if you didn't tell me, i would never have known. i would have exposed for the ground though since you were adding the sky in later. the ground looks very dark which makes the sky the only appealing element.

[macgruder]

if you didnt post the first image, I would have never known, good work. Its a vacation picture, I know how it is, when you are rushed to do things and dont have set up time or the perfect shot.

[Synenergy52]

Yeah crop the ground out. leave a very very small portion of it

[firesuite]

Yeah crop the ground out. leave a very very small portion of it

That was the plan, it was more of a creative shot than a technical one, thus i didn't bother exposing for the ground as its not very interesting except for the palm trees, i like the way the trees silhouette against the sky.

[Grimage]

This is an amazing job! hats off:)

[LeuceDeuce]

That was the plan, it was more of a creative shot than a technical one, thus i didn't bother exposing for the ground as its not very interesting except for the palm trees, i like the way the trees silhouette against the sky.

I'd send the whole ground area into silhouette. Blacken it up good.

[Bill Boehme]

Contextually, I think that you picked some good believable clouds to match the landscape and did a good job of merging them. Now, if you had chosen clouds that are only seen north of the arctic circle, I might be a bit suspicious.