How to use AI to create a mask for the sky in Photoshop

It’s easy to use AI to create a mask for the sky in Adobe Photoshop. Let’s have a look at how to do this.

Using AI to select the sky with Adobe products

Lightroom has the ability to mask the sky. And of course, that means that Camera Raw can do that too since its feature set is very similar to Lightroom.

But Photoshop can do this as well. And with that comes all the various adjustments that a powerful program like Photoshop can do.

Select Sky in Photoshop

In Photoshop, go to the very top menu bar and click on “Select.” This produces a menu. Select “Sky.” The software will analyze the scene using AI and then make a selection around the sky. Sometimes, it will miss part of the sky. In my selection, it selected the distant mountains as part of the sky.

From here, you can adjust the selection as usual. Then, you can apply any adjustments that you ordinarily would do in Photoshop. 

For night photography, one possibility might be to apply a bit of noise reduction. For day images with clouds, people often like to darken the exposure slightly and apply a bit of contrast, vibrance or dehazing.

Subject

Note that similar to Camera Raw or Lightroom, you may also select the subject. This is located in the same menu as the sky. Selecting subject is a way in which AI can alleviate a lot of tedious or time-consuming work for us so we can get on with the more creative touches during our post-processing workflow.