How To Make A Cloudy Sky Blue Using Snapseed

Looking for an easy photo editing tip? Here’s how to make a cloudy sky blue using Snapseed

Today’s post is for all my friends who use the photo editing app Snapseed. It’s a fun app that can easily do a ton of different things for editing photos, but today I wanted to share one of my very favorite techniques – adding a blue sky. We’ve all been there – we have photos that we love, but what the heck is going on with the sky?! I know for myself and anyone else here on Oahu, the sun has been completely sparse for all of 2018. LAME! Seriously – I think it’s beginning to mess with my psyche! Anyway – I was sick of seeing gross white skies in all my photos, so after a little bit of trial and error, I discovered a really simple way to add in a blue sky where there once was gray gross-ness when I don’t have the time or energy to get on my computer and fire up Lightroom. So sit back, relax and let’s dive in…How To Make A Cloud Sky Blue Using Snapseed! Bonus – it’s completely free!

How To Add A Blue Sky To Your Photos

How To Make A Cloudy Sky Blue Using Snapseed

Now for some of you, you might be like – Kait, this is old news, get out of here. But it had me legitimately stumped, so if you feel the same way, go ahead and download Snapseed and let’s get to work! When you open up the app, it will look like this. Click on the photo from your camera roll that you wish to edit. If it’s from your DSLR, make sure you have it in your camera roll before you open up the app.

Once you have the photo open that you want to edit, your screen will look like this, with lots of options at the bottom.

The “Looks” tab will offer some pre-edited filters that can brighten, adjust and edit your photos automatically. The names of the filters give you an idea of how your photo will look. There is also the “Tools” tab, which offers a TON of photo editing tools. This is where we are going to be working today! Specifically the double exposure tool — all the way down on the bottom left. Though after you’re done giving your cloudy photo a blue sky, I definitely recommend messing around with some of the other tools – they are great, too!

So once you have your photo up and you click double exposure, a new window will pop up where you’ll have a little photo icon with a plus (+) sign on it. Click that camera! This is the part where you add in a photo that already has a blue sky. I have a ton in my camera roll and ones with varying clouds, blue-ness, etc. So once you click the photo+ icon, select a photo with a blue sky to match the overall aesthetic of your photo and this is what it will look like.

You can see that my blue sky photo is one taken at the beach. In order to minimize the amount of erasing I need to do, I always move the photo up to adjust it so that the skyline matches (as best as possible) to the other. Like this:

When it looks good to you, click the check mark in the lower right corner. Now, pay close attention, because this is where the detail-based editing comes into play! Obviously you can’t leave a double exposure looking like this. I mean, you can, but LOL – that’s not the point of this tutorial. After you click the check mark, the screen will look like this with three icons in the top right corner – one will look like a stack of papers with an arrow. That’s the one we want! When you click it, this screen will pop up:

Click “View Edits”. When you do that, another screen will come up with a pop-up menu that says “Original” and “Double Exposure”. Click “Double Exposure” and you’ll have three icon options – a trash can, a paint brush with paper and one with three lines. You want to choose the center icon of the paintbrush and paper. Don’t be alarmed when your photo with the white sky shows up again! This is what you want. Making sure that the “Double Exposure” at the bottom is at 100, paint the sky using a single finger!

I always go a little over zealous with the painting and do a touch up job at the end. You can see in the photo below, I painted right over our faces.

Now it’s time to clean it up. Turn the double exposure back down to 0 using the arrows, zoom in using two fingers, and trace the outline of your faces and the skyline so that it reverts back to the normal color and exposure of the photo. You’ll be able to tell when you’ve gone too far or need a little more. You can tell in the below photo, I missed a spot on Dane’s shirt!

 

When you’re all done and the photo looks like you want it to look, go ahead and save it using the check mark to indicate to Snapseed that you are done editing the double exposure. Then click Export in the bottom right corner, save as a copy and you are done! Your new edited photo will show up in your camera roll, as will the original. I always save as a copy just in case I want the original photo(s) for another project.

It probably seems like a lot of steps here and initially, there is a small learning curve, but figuring out this fun (and FREE!) hack was super exciting for me and I knew I wanted to share it. So tell me – what your favorite photo editing apps? Do you have any hacks that you swear by for editing photos? Check out other cool tips, tricks, and life stuff here!