Replacing the sky in Photoshop is easy, but you'll need to add a reflection of your new sky to the water for realistic results. Here's how.

Photoshop has a great Sky Replacement tool. But the only problem is, if there is a body of water in the picture, there's no automated option to create a reflection in the water to match the new sky.

In this tutorial, we'll show you how to add a matching reflection of a Sky Replacement in the water in Photoshop. Let's get started.

Photoshop has made automated selections very easy in the past few years. But there is still room for improvement with its Sky Replacement feature. As you can see, there's no option to add or adjust the new sky's reflection in the water.

For certain images, this could be quite problematic because, without the proper reflection, the image won't be realistic. This may clue in some viewers that a fake sky was used.

Let's show you how to solve this problem.

To add a matching reflection in the water, you first have to go through the brief steps of replacing the sky in Photoshop. If you need a refresher, check out how to use Sky Replacement in Photoshop.

Then we'll duplicate the Background layer and perform another sky selection on a vertically-flipped version of the image. Then we'll flip the image back to its original orientation.

If you want to follow along, you can download this example image from Unsplash.

What we're left with are four layers, the top two of which we'll be working with to add a matching reflection in the water.

Want to try this in another program? We also show you how to replace boring skies with Luminar AI.

The first thing we'll do is clean up our layer stack by deleting Layer 1. Then we'll create a layer mask on the top of the layer stack and brush in the reflection on the water.

Now, we have a perfect copy of the sky's reflection in the water. But to make it more realistic, we'll make a few more adjustments.

In real life, the sky's reflection in the water rarely matches the intensity of the sky itself. We'll decrease the Opacity on the middle layer to fix this. We'll also add an optional blur effect to the same layer.

That's it! Here are the results:

Replacing the sky in Photoshop is easy, but it doesn't always yield realistic results if there is a body of water in the picture. This tutorial showed you how to fix that. It may seem like a lot of steps, but once you practice this trick, you can add a matching reflection in the water in less than a minute.

Craig Boehman is a Mumbai-based American photographer. He writes articles about Photoshop and photo editing for MakeUseOf.com.

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