It doesn’t matter what kind of photography you do, there will be times when your pictures would benefit from a sky replacement. Just make sure you avoid this blindingly obvious mistake whenever you do them in Photoshop.

French photographer and educator Serge Ramelli is back once again with another insightful video on replacing skies in your images. Ramelli shows a handful of different examples of what does and doesn’t make a good sky replacement. He then stresses how crucial it is that you don’t shoehorn a sky into your work if it wasn’t taken at a similar time of day as your original image. This obvious point makes complete sense, but I have to be honest that I’m guilty of breaking this rule on occasion and I’m sure many of you have too. Ramelli points out how subtle clues in the lighting from the position of the sun will either consciously or subconsciously alert the viewer that something isn’t right in the photo, and as the majority of us want our edits to be seamless, this wouldn’t be a good thing.

The video also shows the benefits of having a library of skies which you can call upon for your various edits, and Ramelli includes a link so you can download some free high-resolution skies to get your library started. If you have shot something recently that you feel could use a little help in the sky department, why not try the techniques and files in the video and show us your transformations in the comments below.