I took a few shots of Vicky recently and I was in the pool while she was above me.

I know there is a way to somehow make the sky blue behind her, but not change the color of her in the photo. I've been told to use the graduated tool in Lightroom and I've viewed a few videos on it and still, for the life of me, I can't figure out what I need to do.

Could someone "please" help me with this?

If you don't mind, could you possible even write down all the steps you take to get the background blue?

Feel free to edit this shot.


Sample Photo

Come on, someone please help me out here !!

You may get a more useful response if you post the question to a more appropriate forum: Post processing and printing.

If there is indeed blue pixels in there, go to the luminosity in the HSL. Pull the blue slider all the way to the left and see if that helps.

Do you have the RAW file? Did you try reducing the exposure to recover the blue? As it looks now, the picture look pretty badly blown out... the only blue I see is around her hair.

Arka C.

I think you had better do it in photoshop. Create a mask for her and then a blue layer and drop her in.

Yes, I have a RAW file of it.

I thought I was posting in the correct forum, my apologies.

How do you do it in Photoshop, if Lightroom isn't the answer? I truly thought Lightroom would be the answer and use the gradient tool.

Sorry that I haven't replied until just now, I was out of town.

You mean something like this?
Only four Steps: (in photoshop)

Select subject
delete background
create new layer
filter/render/clouds

In Photoshop, I would also select the blur tool, small brush (5 - 10px) with no hardness at about 20%. Then just go carefully round the edge of the cutout image a gently soften the transition. It will make it look more realistic.

It only needs a minute amount of blur to make the huge difference on the blend.

It is easier to use the channels layer and create a new layer from the channel where her the selection has the most highlights for her hair and body....probably end up being the red channel would be my guess. Then once you created a duiplicate of that red layer you keep that new duplicate channel selected and go and make sure black is your foreground color and select a soft edge brush..probably the 100 would work good here and with the new channel selected and just brush away all the areas of the back ground away. This eliminates all the harsh left over peices of the background left in her hair that you see a lot of times in composites that weren't really done correctly.

Now that you've brushed away all the sections you want eliminated from your original image...with the your newly created channel layer selected you want to load that channel to do this press command or control key and click on that channel layer. Then once you've done this go back over to your layers tab where you image layers are located and select your original image layer then click and hold command or control then click J to paste that selection into a new layer. Then you can play with the blend mode on that newly created selection layer to adjust the look you want...normally the blend mode screen works pretty well, but play around with it until you get the look you want.

Hope this helps a little bit.