Cover Art: the Sky’s the Limit

In my previous life I worked in a digital/creative field, which meant that I had a decent regular exposure to the Adobe suite of products. So, when it came to creating covers for my books, I decided to give it a go myself rather than jump straight to a professional. Of course that means understanding a lot of concepts, not limited to but including:

• Layout & design
• Colour theory
• Image manipulation
• Typography & font pairing

Although I’m a huge advocate for Adobe Lightroom when it comes to photo editing, I had a half-formulated plan to jump across to the Affinity suite of products for everything else. I’ve been dabbling in Affinity Photo, Designer and Publisher and am hugely impressed, not the least because of their iPad integration, offering what is essentially the full desktop versions of Photo and Designer with very little compromise (and Publisher for iPad is being developed as we speak).

So, my idea was to lay out the cover in Affinity Publisher and then use its integrations with Photo and Designer for editing the actual content. But then Adobe Photoshop entered the chat, kicking sand in my face and flexing its newest update. It has a lot of neat stuff added (including some pretty freakish AI-driven filters), but the reason it’s stayed firmly in the middle of my workflow is all down to one new feature.

The Sky Replacement tool.

So, what is the Sky Replacement tool? Well, it’s right there on the tin — it replaces the sky in your photo with a different sky. It also performs subtle colour corrections, giving you a bunch of options to tweak to produce a surprisingly realistic result. I’m going to caveat my enthusiasm by saying that the tool doesn’t do anything that you couldn’t do manually, painstakingly masking images by hand. It just does it with one click. Great, right? Maybe?

To understand why this is so cool, let’s run through a practical example.

I’m trying to achieve a certain consistent layout in my book covers that includes some sort of landscape in the bottom quarter — it could be a mountain range, an ominous castle, or a river running through a forest. This image needs to run all the way to the top of the cover to provide a full background plate, but I only want the point of focus to be in the bottom 25% — the rest needs to be interestingly neutral so that I can overlay text, additional imagery etc.

I head out into the wilderness with my trusty camera (normally an Olympus OMD-EM5 Mark 2, although the example I show below was shot on an iPhone) and grab some snaps. But the long portrait format of a book cover (8 × 5 inches) is quite awkward to capture on the fly, especially with the aforementioned rules (subject in bottom quarter, neutral on top). And of course, despite my example showing some blue sky, normally heading into Scottish winter means that for most days the sky is an over-bright grey. Neutral? Yes. Interestingly neutral? Not a chance, buddy.

Back to my example. I take a bunch of photos but when I get home, the only one I’m happy with is in the wrong shape — I took the photo in landscape mode rather than portrait mode. Curses!

So into Photoshop I go. I correct the aspect ratio by cropping the sides and then extending the top of the image until the size is a perfect 8 × 5. This means extending the image higher than its original extents, so I fill the white background with a basic blue gradient. This helps the Sky Replacement Tool understand what the sky actually is. I also straighten the image to compensate for my wonky original hand-held snap.

Then I apply the sky replacement. Photoshop comes with a bunch of sky examples, so I select a nice dramatic sky that still leaves a largely neutral upper half. Once this step is done, I perform an additional foreground colour correction to increase the purple on the castle and surrounds, and give a slight tweak to the exposure.

And after that (very) minimal amount of effort, what I’m left with is an image that is ready for me to place into Affinity Publisher for the full cover layout. As it links directly to the psd file, I can easily update the image in Photoshop and have that reflect in Publisher. And all achieved in under five minutes. Of course, for a production-ready cover, I’d spend more time on the little things like masking out fences, localised colour corrections and balancing the overall tone of the image.

Another good reason this tool is so powerful is through the sky library itself. Although Photoshop gives you a few dozen examples, the real power comes in adding your own sky photos to the library and using them — after all, if everyone starts using the same default skies, they’ll be picked out from a mile away.

So, you could go nuts with your camera and take photos of skies in all sorts of conditions, times and lighting… or you could search on free stock image websites like Unsplash… or for the most professional look you could take a leaf from the VFX industry, and invest in some high quality third-party sky collections that have been specifically curated and captured. These are what form the back-plates to special effects and visualisation for film / TV, and there are lots of amazing products to choose from. I’ve personally had good luck with skies from:

• Vishopper
• Hyperfocal
• Dosch Design
• Vizpeople

Well, there you have it. It seems like a simple addition, but the Sky Replacement tool comes with a lot of benefits; when I’m out shooting I don’t have to worry so much about getting the perfect shot through the lens. I don’t need to worry if the weather isn’t cooperating. And I know that I have a greater ability to dramatically alter the mood of my shot with minimal time investment. Happy days!

Originally published at https://darcyarmstrong.com on November 9, 2020.