Real or Fake Sky?

Alright, kind of a weird post here… and I normally am not one to do this much post processing on photos – either they are good in the camera or they get deleted. I mean sure, sometimes if the subject is really good I’ll do as much recovery as necessary to get the shot back to the way I saw it, and I’ll do some backscatter cleanup from time to time. But this is different… here I am using Photoshop to completely replace whole sections of the photo. I am making a scene that never existed. And for me, that is pretty much unheard of.

Anyway, I recently took some photos that I liked except for the skies. I won’t go into why I didn’t like the skies because it might help you figure out which of the following photos have real skies and which are faked. Conveniently, Photoshop just added a new feature called Sky Replacement. So I gave it a whirl and I have to say that the results are actually pretty impressive. Sometimes it breaks down and I can’t get a replacement that looks even remotely real, but for the following attempts, I think it does pretty well… even for the cases where there is a sky and reflection of the sky…

Take a look and see which ones you think are real and which you think are fake. It might be best to view them all in the lightbox, so just click on one and it will open the lightbox and you can scroll through them there.

Some I changed just for the heck of it to see what Photoshop could do… and I’ll give you a hint – one of the sets is a trick question!

Enjoy!