Photoshop Sneak Peek: Sky Replacement Tool (September 2020)

Adobe has just released a teaser video showcasing an important (upcoming) update to Photoshop which uses artificial intelligence to intelligently help replace the skies in your images.

Adobe has been pushing AI-based tools for several years now but some of the competition is not too far behind and specifically, when it comes to sky replacement tools, Luminar 4 from Skylum has actually been quite ahead of Adobe, showcasing its tool almost a year ago.

The new Adobe tool works with the help of Sensei AI (Adobe’s AI proprietary technology) to select the foreground from the sky in an image and masks the sky. The user will have an option of different skies to choose from or (maybe more creatively bring in his/her own sky picture for the software to blend).

Although we didn’t have a chance to test this feature, yet – being able to bring in your own image seems like a very important option. Aside from bringing in completely different skies from a different location/time of day etc., professional landscape photographers might want to use this feature to bring in pictures taken from the same location with either different exposures or when the clouds are more or less pronounced, using this as a sort of automatic tool for compositing images.

One of the most interesting features showcased in this short sneak peek is the ability to automatically and intelligently tone the foreground of the image based on the color temperature of the sky selected (so the image tone will change to a warmer tone if you select an orange subset or to a cooler blue if you are choosing a blue hour look to your skies).

What is likely to make or break this feature is the way the multiple parameters you can tweak will actually work in the composited image and we can’t wait to try it ourselves and report back.

As Adobe normally does when it comes to future feature sneak peeks, there is no official date for this tool to be announced, however, based on our experience with most previous releases, this feature is likely to appear in the next major Photoshop update (possibly sometime around October-Novmber 2020 – no promises though).

You can check out past Photoshop released sneak peeks – here. You can find many more Photoshop videos on LensVid’s Photoshop section.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.