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[This video is part of Getting Started with Adobe Photoshop Elements 9]
One of the most common image editing requests I hear from people is
to be able to make the sky of an image blue,
or in more cases than not, bluer than it currently is.
Photoshop Elements 9 provides a tool that is pretty much built for this job.
Let's take a look at how it works and how to refine it to suit your needs.
I'm beginning this video from the Elements 9 Organizer,
and I'm going to do a quick text search for the word bridge,
and as you can see there is an image in here called bridge.jpg.
So I'm going to select this image,
and I want to edit this in the Photoshop Element's Editor,
so I'm going to come over to the Fix tab, click on the triangle to the right,
and choose Full Photo Edit,
and when this opens in Photoshop Elements,
I'm going to select a tool down here at the bottom called the Smart Brush Tool.
Now if you don't currectly see this icon, you can just click and hold on it,
and then select it by choosing it from the list,
and the minute that you select this tool, you're presented with another panel
that allows you to choose the adjustment that you want to apply.
So you can see that there's a number of different adjustments in here.
We can make grass and foliage greener. We can do high contrast red fill.
We can do lipstick teeth for pearly whites.
We have a bunch of localized adjustments that can be used.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come up to the top,
and I have an option called Blue Skies,
so I'm going to double click on that option, and that's going to select that.
Now if for some reason you select the wrong one,
you can always come back up here to this icon, click on it, or choose a different one.
So I make sure that Blue Skies is selected,
and the Smart Brush Tool works off of a brush shape,
so much like other tools in Photoshop Elements, it's based on a brush size
so we can come up here to our brush, and I can click on the triangle,
and I can increase the size or decrease it.
I can adjust it to suit my needs.
So I'm going to go with somewhere around 100, maybe a little bit more.
That looks pretty good, and then I'll click back on the Brush picker to close it,
and what I want to do is I basically want to paint in the area that I want to adjust,
and Photoshop Elements is going to try to detect the boundaries and the contrast edge
where it's going to be applied.
So this is kind of like the Quick Selection Tool if you've used that before.
But I'm just going to click and drag to start painting,
and you can see that it's starting to detect the contrast edges, and I'm just dragging across,
and you can see that Photoshop Elements has detected the boundaries,
or what it thinks are the boundaries,
and when I let go of the mouse,
it's automatically going to apply that nice blue hue to the sky area.
Now I'm going to zoom in a little bit. I'll actually go in to 100%,
so we double click on the Zoom Tool to zoom in here,
and I'll just hold down the space bar to look at the different areas.
Now I'm going to click on the Smart Brush Tool again,
and I'll just go ahead and close this, that's fine.
Well you see we still have this area selected.
Now you can see how this has creeped into the building here,
and it's gone a little bit too far.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold down Ctrl-Alt on Mac,
and I'm going to click and drag to make my brush smaller.
If you're on Windows, you'll hold down Ctrl-Alt, and you'll right click and drag.
So what I'm going to do is to remove from this selection,
I'm just going to hold down the Option key on Mac or the Alt key on Windows,
and I'm going to click to remove this area from the selected area.
I'm just going to kind of drag on the buildings here to remove this from the selection,
and you can see that it kind of readjusts itself,
and I'm just going to look around here to see if it's creeped in anywhere else.
We can see it's creeping in there, so once again, Option on Mac, Alt on Windows,
and I'm kind of removing that area from the selection.
Trying to get it not to affect the buildings so much,
and quite honestly, the way that this effect is applied
is that it's really not affecting this portion of the sky as much as the top.
You'll notice it's kind of vignetted, and the top portion gets the most effect,
and the bottom portion gets less of an effect.
So I'm just fine tuning this. We probably don't have to get too crazy here.
I'll press Command 0 on Mac--Control 0 on Windows,
and once again, we can see how this effect is being applied,
and it looks pretty good.
Now what we do now is if we are happy with the selection,
we can deselect this, so we can press Command D on Mac
or Control D on Windows,
and the way this effect is applied is that an adjustment layer has been applied,
and you can see that we have a new layer called Blue Skies,
and yours might have a 1, 2, or 3 depending on how often you've used this
with the image open, but this looks pretty good,
and we have the color adjustment, and then we have what's called a layer mask,
and a layer mask is basically letting this effect be applied only
in the white area of that mask.
Now if it got too intense for you, you can come down here to the Opacity slider,
and we can pull it back if we want to decrease the intensity of the effect,
or drag to the right to increase the intensity of the effect.
Now in addition, we can even take it 1 step further because, once again,
the way that this effect is applied makes it very versatile, and by the way,
if you want to see before and after, just click the Visibility icon next to the layer,
and now it's before we turn it on
and it's after.
Now what we can also do is we can--with this layer selected,
I'm actually going to drag this layer down to the new layer button
which is basically going to duplicate this layer.
And now you can see that we've doubled the application of this layer,
and we have twice as much intensity on this layer than we did before.
So we can turn 1 of them off, and see that that's 1 layer applied.
Turn the other 1 off, and now we are back to our original.
If we turn both of them on, now we've got that double intensity.
That might look a little bit too intense for us, so we can click on 1 of these layers,
and then click on the Opacity slider and just reduce that to find some happy medium
between the full-strength and somewhere less,
and once again, I'll do Command D on Mac and Control D on Windows, and you can see
that by adding a couple adjustment layers and using that Smart Brush Tool,
we've really enhanced this photo and made it look quite a bit better.
We've got a couple spots in here that we can do some retouching to at our leisure,
but it definitely looks much better than it did before.
As you can see, Photoshop Elements 9 does a fantastic job
at making a sky blue in an image.
With a little bit of know-how, you can make refinements
that will leave the sky looking realistic, and you'll have everyone wondering
how you took such a great shot!
