Kudos to LR/ACR on the "select sky" masking option

[Paul2660]

Just wanted to pass on that with the latest version of Masking in LR/ACR, with select sky, they have reached a new level of perfection.  For years, masking around difficult sky subjects, like tree branches, bridges, etc. has been a real problem for me.  C1 with their masking process can get there albeit with a lot more work than a single click.  Example shown below.  A bridge with tons of small details where the sky is intertwined, and attempting to manually mask just the sky would take hours.  With Select Sky, simple single click, all the sky is selected.  Create a new mask, select the sky again and invert and you have the balance of the image.  Really a very good tool.

Paul

[David Eichler]

Just wanted to pass on that with the latest version of Masking in LR/ACR, with select sky, they have reached a new level of perfection.  For years, masking around difficult sky subjects, like tree branches, bridges, etc. has been a real problem for me.  C1 with their masking process can get there albeit with a lot more work than a single click.  Example shown below.  A bridge with tons of small details where the sky is intertwined, and attempting to manually mask just the sky would take hours.  With Select Sky, simple single click, all the sky is selected.  Create a new mask, select the sky again and invert and you have the balance of the image.  Really a very good tool.

Paul

I have a lot of experience masking skies with Photoshop and you do not have to it completely manually there, though really challenging subjects of the kind I often encounter usually require some manual touch-up work. I think the subject you provide has enough contrast for an automatic selection to work reasonably well. I often encounter subjects where the automatic selection tools in Lightroom and Photoshop routinely include more than just the sky in the selection, as well as not entirely selecting all of the sky. So, there is no panacea here. The refine mask feature in Photoshop can be very helpful, which Lightroom does not have. I continue to use Photoshop for most sky replacements that I do.

[Paul2660]

I am familiar with refine mask on photoshop and have used it often. With the select sky feature I have yet to find a miss yet and this is with very challenging examples. Leaves and or pine needles etc. the speed at which it woks is also impressive and saves a vast amount of time. Its unfortunate that Adobe has such a terrible raw conversation for Phase One 3100 and 4150 files as I would love to use it with them. 

Paul

[dreed]

It seems that the sky select can get a bit confused when there's a lot of foilage.