best way to remove a background?

I have a picture with a lot of trees and would like to remove the sky behind it.

What is the easiest way to remove all the sky in the nooks and crannies? is there a technique anyone can recommend?

much thanks

Ther are probably better and faster ways, but I often use the Magic Wand tool. It can be tedious and time consuming if done carefully. If not done carefully, the results can be crummy looking with lots of jaggies. Also the Magic Eraser tool works well. I am sure that there are much more clever ways available now in PS that were not there years ago when I learned to do these things on early versions of PS.

If I am not mistaken, Adobe has a lot of online training videos on using Photoshop.

Have you seen this? http://av.adobe.com …brown/AdvancedM​asking.mov

That is one of the hardest things to do and make it still look good. It can be done but be prepared for lots of tweaking on your selection.

The way I do it is to first of all make a duplicate layer to protect your image. I then get rid of the easy stuff using the background eraser or the plain eraser. I then start in using the select color range and delete them. You have to do a couple of sample runs to see if you should be feathering the selection and if so by how much. This works fairly good if the sky is a fairly constant color. I always go into quick mask before doing the delete to make sure that I have the selection the way I want. Sometimes it is hard to tell with the dancing ants.

You can also sometimes use the cloning tool to fill in some of the sky "holes" in trees with leaves as long as you don't go overboard and turn the tree top into a round green ball.

I also use the extract tool, but it does not leave clean edges so it is necessary to go back and clean them up. I often use the pen tool for this purpose if the edges are fairly sharp.

Do you need to remove it, or just darken it? Some good links in here:
http://www.luminous-landscape.com …/u-contrast-masking.shtml