Donna Devine wrote:
> et voila! It worked! Thanks *so* much, Duncan.
>
> Unfortunately, the only people I know who are familiar with
> Photoshop don't live in my vicinity.
>
> After managing to get the great new sky in, however, I'm still
> confronted with a pale glow/line along the seam join. How do you
> best eliminate or avoid it?

Donna,

That's where finesse and artistry comes in. You've probably got some of the blown sky from your "main" image still peaking through at the boundaries. You need to fine-tune your layer mask. Here's what I would suggest doing.

What you're going to do is very softly mask away the glowing line. You'll probably hide a very small amount of the foreground image also, but if you're careful, it shouldn't be noticable.

Go to the layers palette and click on the layer mask for your "main" layer. You should see a thin rectangle appear around the layer mask. This tells you that the layer mask is the new target for drawing. Now select the pen tool, set the pen color to black, and select a large, very soft-edged pen (try 50-100 pixels as a starting point, with a hardness of 50% or so. The size of the brush you need varies with the amount of detail in the boundary you're trying to touch up. Use a smaller brush for more details, and a larger brush for less detailed transition areas.) Then zoom in to 100% on the boundary that has the glowing line on it. I suggest you go to the cursor and brush preferences and select "brush size" mode so you can tell how big your brush is. Then center your brush in the area that's already masked away, click down, and very carefully ring the brush cursor towards the glowing line. As you get closer, the feathered edges of the brush will start to extend the layer mask, and it should hide your glowing line. If you go too far, you can either undo your last brush stroke, or switch the brush to white, and paint back the mask. That's the really cool thing about layer masks. If you don't like what you did, you can adjust the mask to your heart's content.

Another way you could do this would be to go back to your original image, and after you've created your selection for the part of the sky that you want to mask away, choose select>modify selection>expand, and expand your selection by a few pixels (try 2-5 pixels as a starting point.) Then choose select>feather and feather your selection slightly. This should extend the mask enough to hide your glowing line. Then proceed with your "add layer mask>hide selection" step.

Duncan C
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