Hello everybody, Yanik Chauvin once again, on a little quickie tutorial today. It’s quite simple and I’ve had a few requests for this, so let’s go right to it.

So, what we’re going to be doing is darkening our sky our lovely blue sky, as if we’ve had a, either circular polarizer or a graduated neutral density filter on our lens, but we’ll do it the Photoshop way, and it’s really, really, really simple to do. Now here’s a lovely photo of a house that I took in Blue Levant which is a place where you can go and see tons, and tons of lavender fields here in Quebec, and it’s gorgeous, it smells great. And I thought the house looked pretty cool as well, so I snapped a shot of it. Now, of course, want darkening the sky up a little bit. What we need to do first is to create a new layer.

Now I’ll bring my layers over for you guys to see, and down here, you have the icon to create a new layer. We’ll click on that, and you have your blank layer that appears here. I always suggest that we rename our layers, and I’ll call this “dark sky”, there we go. And the next thing we want to do is to create our dark sky. So, let’s go for it. You’ll see it’s really simple. Let’s get this out of the way. What you need to do is make sure that your foreground color here is black, and then you want to select the gradient tool. Make sure your gradient tool is selected on linear gradient, which is the first icon here. And also make sure that it goes from black to transparent, which is usually the second icon. Not black and white, but black to transparent, it’s really important.

All right, now we’re going to draw a vertical line down, about here to the house, as vertical as you can, and we’ll let go. And there you go. And you’re going to say, “Yanik, yuck our sky is all black! What are we going to do?” Well this is when the trick comes in. Let me bring my layers palette back in here a second and you can see the blending mode of these layers is at normal, clicking on that, you get a menu that appears and what you need to select is overlay. Now you select that, and you can see that the sky turned incredibly blue, and incredibly dark, maybe that’s the effect you want.

But what’s great about that is you can play with that effect and have complete control or how dark you want your sky by reducing the opacity of the layer. As you can see as I reduce the opacity, the sky is lightening up a little bit or darkening it. So if I’m going at around, 50%-49%, yes that’s about right for what I want for the feel of this. And with that out of the way and there we go. Let’s look at before, and after. Before, and after, it was that simple. So, once again, black to transparent gradient, changing your layer mode to overlay and then playing with the opacity. Thank you! And talk to you soon. Bye-bye.