Photoshop User - USA (2021-01)

 PHOTOSHOP PROVING GROUND

KELBYONE.COM

STEP TWO: What we need now is a little “sky love”
in the water-covered ground. Start by turning
off the Sky Replacement Group by clicking its
Eye icon in the Layers panel. Then select your
photo layer and duplicate it (Command-J [PC:
Ctrl-J]). On the duplicate photo layer, go to
Edit>Transform>Flip Vertical. This is different
than Rotate 180°—remember that we want a
reflection, not a rotation!

STEP THREE: Go back to Edit>Sky Replacement
and ensure the same sky you used previously
is still active. If everything looks good, click
OK. Double-click the name of the new group
and rename it to “Ground Replacement Group.”
So now we have a layer stack that looks
something like this.

STEP FOUR: Now the challenge begins! If you select the group and

try to flip one more time, things may not work so well. Most of the

time, the transform will fail to work on everything. First, the masks

generated aren’t linked to the layer content, but that’s easy to solve!

But more critically, the Sky layer content isn’t cropped to the actual

layer. Why does that matter?

There’s a quirk in how Transform works: by default, it applies to

the actual layer contents, and not the document bounds. When Sky

Replacement does its magic, it lets you drag the sky around and

scale it to keep things flexible. When it returns the new layers to

your document, it doesn’t crop the sky at all, giving you the ability

to continue moving things around a little. Even though you can’t see

the extra content, it’s there, outside your canvas.

One solution is to press Command-A (PC: Ctrl-A) to select the

entire canvas and then use the Image>Crop command. This is fine

if you know you’re not going to move anything around. From here,

you’d simply link the Sky image to its mask by clicking between the

two thumbnails in the Layers panel (you’ll see a chain icon between

them showing they’re linked). Do the same for the Foreground Lighting

layer, and finish with Edit>Transform>Flip Vertical on the Ground

Replacement group to get things back to normal. Finally, turn on

the visibility of the original Sky Replacement Group and turn off the

visibility of the Background copy layer.

STEP FIVE: If you want to keep the flexibility of being able to move

the sky reflection, there’s a better approach, with only a tiny bit more

effort. Go back to before you cropped the image, and create a new

guide set (View>New Guide Layout) with two columns and two rows.

This creates a center point where the guides cross.