Can you add cumulus clouds without replacing the whole sky?

[henders64]

Hello Affinity Users -

I'm making a mountain panorama and have had some trouble making the sky look better.  The sky is mostly bright blue with a few small clouds near the edges of the panorama.  I tried replacing the whole sky, but I had some problems with the boundary between sky and mountain.  That was the subject of a previous post.  What I'm wondering is if people have tried adding fluffy cumulus clouds to a blue sky without replacing the entire sky.  I can imagine that might be difficult, but I'm not sure.  Looking to see if anyone has done that before.

Thank you for your attention.

 

[stokerg]

Hi henders64,

I think the easiest/quickest way would be to Clone them from another picture (the Clone tool allows you to set a Global Source so you can then clone from 1 open picture onto your Panorama). 

There's likely a way to generate clouds with the Procedural Texture Live Filter Layer or Perlin Noise, but i've never been able to get them generate correctly when i've played around with those filters (that's my failing, not Affinity Photo)

[henders64]

Interesting idea.  I tried it an ran into a new problem.

Given that the cloned cloud arrives with a little bit of blue sky on the edges, there was a need to equalize the blue attached to the cloud and the blue of the base image.

I cloned the cloud onto a pixel layer and then tried to adjust the color of the blue sky using both HSL adjustment and selective color adjustment.  I could get pretty close, but there was still a noticeable boundary between the blue of the cloned cloud and the background sky.

I also tried the color replacement brush tool but had some problems with it because it matches the hue and not the saturation and level, so there are some games to play there to make things right.

Suggestions?

[thomaso]

Alternatively to adjusting the blue edge around the clouds you could just remove these parts by either using the Brush Selection Tool (optionally + Refine button after 'drawing' the cloud) or use the Inpaint Brush Tool to 'paint' the blue of the background sky to the cloud layer.

[firstdefence]

see my reply to the same question here: