Adobe Sky Replace Automatically Swaps Blown Out Skies

Blown out skies have been vexing photographers for as long as there have been landscape photos. At the MAX 2016 conference, Adobe gave one of its traditional “sneak peaks” at an upcoming feature called Sky Replace.

As the name suggests, the tool is designed to replace blown out or unattractive skies with more appealing options, while making adjustments to the rest of the image to make the new sky feel more authentic.

In the demo, you can see the new sky being chosen from a collection of other images, as well as a more automated mode where the software actually chooses the sky automatically. The software can then present a variety of options from which you can choose.

As always, it seems like there’s a good bit of technology driving this functionality and the idea of changing the rest of the photo to match the new sky is a clever one. I have personally seen a lot of very bad results when people try this on their own because matching is so hard, so this might give those people a better starting point.

This seems like the kind of thing that would feel right at home in one of Adobe’s mobile apps for photo editing, so before long, we could be seeing images with faked background blur and replaced skies coming straight out of smartphone cameras. It’s an interesting time for photo editing to be sure.

As always, it seems like there’s a good bit of technology driving this functionality and the idea of changing the rest of the photo to match the new sky is a clever one. I have personally seen a lot of very bad results when people try this on their own because matching is so hard, so this might give those people a better starting point.

This seems like the kind of thing that would feel right at home in one of Adobe’s mobile apps for photo editing, so before long, we could be seeing images with faked background blur and replaced skies coming straight out of smartphone cameras. It’s an interesting time for photo editing to be sure.