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For creating stellar landscapes every time

Shooting on Location at Garden of the Gods

Welcome to Garden of the Gods! This strange and unusual combination of geology and history date back 300 million years. Giant crimson towers rise into the sky, making this tiny city park a landscape photographer’s dream come true. For the duration of this course, Garden of Gods will be our stomping grounds. Here, we shoot on location and capture the baseline images which will become the foundation of our sky replacement composite. 

Shooting Clouds in the Neighborhood

Clouds are an essential ingredient to any good sky replacement. In this episode, we find all the clouds we need right here in the neighborhood! Just head to the top of your favorite home town hill and let the sky serve up a beautiful dish of fluffy cotton candy.

Lightroom – Organizing Your Images for Sky Replacement

Before we can combine our images together, we need to get organized in Lightroom. In this lesson, we collect all of the images we have captured in the field and prepare them for the steps ahead.

Lightroom – Developing the Landscape Image

In this lesson, we use the Development Module in Lightroom to perform some basic exposure and color edits to our landscape image.

Lightroom – Developing the Sky

In this lesson, we use the Development Module in Lightroom to perform some basic exposure and color edits to our sky image.

Compositing Strategy – Understanding Light

From which direction is the light hitting your landscape? From which direction is the light hitting your clouds? Are these directions properly lined up? Or are they wrong? In this lesson we cover the basic lighting strategy for building successful sky replacements. 

Photoshop – Choosing the Right Sky for Your Landscape

Which sky should we use to create our composite? Not just any sky will do. In this lesson, we try several different sunset images to find the perfect light and composition to build our sky replacement. 

Photoshop – Automatic Sky Replacement

Photoshop provides a very powerful tool that will automatically replace the sky in your landscape image. But, is it as good as what we can do by hand? Time will tell…

 Photoshop – Masking the Sky by Hand

In this lesson, we learn how to expertly cut out the sky from our original image and replace it with a whole new sky of our choice. 

Photoshop – The Final Refinements 

In our final lesson, we use adjustment layers to paint with light and create an artistic flourish to the final composite. 

Lewis Carlyle is a landscape and portrait photographer living in beautiful Colorado Springs, Colorado. A travel writer and documentary filmmaker, he has spent years hiking in the backcountry of America’s most spectacular wilderness areas.

Today, Lewis serves as Creative Director of Premium Light Academy. A founding member of this new online tutorial platform, he brings a cinematic approach to educational content. Lewis firmly believes that photography has the power to change the world for the better. His work is dedicated to that dream.