Selecting the sky from tree line and masking

[BrokenBiker]

I came across a small tutorial on what's called the "Orton effect", and tried it out. It works pretty good, and it's simple. But in playing around w/ a few of my pics on this, I inadvertantly came across an old problem for me so I thought I'd throw it here for the experts on this board...once again. :-D

Here's the problem I've run into a few times. When selecting the sky in a picture from a tree line, there's almost always some kind of either 'extra' or 'lack' in the selection and making the 'ground' match up w/ the selected sky often results in some kind of mismatch.

In this picture I tried using a mask--something I'm still pretty new at. I read over Bruce's tutorial on masking, but have really only tried using masking once before. I didn't do too bad. The mismatch between the tree-line and the sky is easiest to see in the left side of the picture.

The picture was taken by a friend of mine w/ a Canon Rebel and a 35mm-300mm equivalent lens...I think. He snapped it while on a narrow boat trip w/ some friends in England. And it evidently has some dust on the sensors, but I think I took care of most of that in the pic.

So, basically, I'm looking for tips on how to select the sky against a tree-line w/o manually selecting all the leaves and branches...which I've done before and it takes a while, to say the least. Also, if anyone has other tips/tutorials on masking I'd appreciate that.

Here's the original:






Here's w/ the Orton effect, but the sky's blown out:





Here's the one w/ the corrected sky using a mask:

[Donb10]

I played with shadows & highlights after applying the orton effect and again added a little texture.

Hope you don't mind..........

[Ann Martin]

That last image tweak is stunning, Don. Just incredible.

[DJ.]

Both produce very nice results!

[jeffkohn]

You might try using "Blend-if" in the layer properties dialog. Basically you would exclude the sky from the layer that's lightening it by sliding the white slider for the "gray" channel over to the left until the sky is no affected. Ctrl+Clicking on the slider will allow you to "split" it so that you can add a feather to the transition to make it a bit smoother.