It’s fair to expect the Sky Replacement tool to do a pretty good job without much faff. This image is a great candidate: brightly and evenly lit, nice and sharp, well exposed.

Read our in-depth Adobe Photoshop CC (2021) review.

You should also make sure your foreground subject is large – Sky Replacement works great with urban landscapes as well as classically-composed rural landscapes, but if you’ve got something smallish in the frame (a person standing on a hill, for example) you might find you get unpredictable results. So if you’ve got a bird shot, for example, that was taken while angling your camera into the sky, you can be sure it’s going to either look pretty weird, or require a lot of finagling before you have a presentable shot. Some pictures won’t work at all – most of the options in Photoshop’s replacement sky library are designed to be used with photos taken from a perspective that, broadly speaking, is shot perpendicular to the horizon. Photoshop is going to make an effort to change the color balance of your frame, but if the foreground – everything except the sky – has under-exposed shadows or over-exposed highlights, it’s going to struggle.

In particular, make sure your image is well-exposed. Not every image in your collection will be a great candidate for the Sky Replacement tool. This image, with its de-focussed foreground and small subject, is going to trip up Photoshop’s Sky Replacement engine.

View my house from the sky