Many times it happens that we have a very beautiful and dynamic subject but the sky in the background is very boring and dull and that makes the whole photo loose its appeal and very average. We know that you must have at one photo that is the same and you wished if there were some beautiful clouds that day, which would have made the whole picture absolutely amazing. Now it may not be naturally possible to ensure the clouds of your liking at a particular day, during the photo shoot but what we can do is that we can easily add clouds in the picture by using the famous post processing tool called Adobe Photoshop. There are a number of ways to do this in Photoshop but we will present one of the easiest method to achieve this.

Now let’s take an example of the picture below. It is very visible in the picture below that the whole becomes very average due to the boring looking sky in the background. Adding clouds by replacing the sky will make the background far more interesting and full of activity and hence will increase the beauty of the whole picture. To do so, open the image below in Adobe Photoshop.

After opening the picture in Adobe Photoshop, the first thing we need to do it to select the part of the image that is covered by the boring and empty sky. You can do so by using any of the selecting tools that Adobe Photoshop provides but according to us the best tool for such purpose is the Magic Wand Tool. This tool can be accessed from the left menu panel as presented in the figure below. You can see in the figure that all the areas of the image with blue sky are selected. You need to remember that you can increase the area under selection by hitting Shift+Left Click on the area that you desire to add in the selection.

Now we will increase the brightness of the selected sky area by using the levels tool. The levels too can be accessed by clicking the Image menu at the left top side. That will open a drop menu, select Adjustments and then Levels. It can also be accessed by using Ctrl+L shortcut key. As visible in the image below, it will open the levels window with these visible buttons.

Now click on the Whites slider as highlighted in the image above and drag it to left till the whole sky becomes bright white as shown in the image below.

Now open up the clouds image that you want to add into the original image. When opened in Photoshop, select the whole image by hitting Ctrl+A and then copy by hitting Ctrl+C. After that come to your original image whose sky you want to replace and paste the clouds image into the original image. You can do so by going to the Edit menu at the left top. Then click Paste Special and then click Paste Into. You can also do the same by hitting the shortcut Alt+Shift+Ctrl+V.

Now change the mode of the clouds layer from Normal to Darken.

After this we shall attempt to improve the integration of the two images and make them appear natural. To do so, select the mask layer and select the brush tool as highlighted in the picture below. Remember to choose the white color for the brush. Using the tool, click it over the edges where the clouds image interacts with the original image.

So that is it! See how beautiful the image looks with the dull and boring looking sky replaced with the amazing looking sky with beautiful clouds in it.