Using smart brush details elsewhere in your picture

Question

Years ago when using other photo manipulation products I can recall adding clouds to sky & then because  the picture had water in it, I flipped the new sky image, made it partially transparent & had the new sky reflect in the water.
I was wondering if that now its so easy to say add a sunset by using the smart brush tool that the new layer which was created as a mask & adjustment layer as well could also be used as the basis if adding the reflection into the water.  Is this possible & if so how is it done?
And while I'm thinking about clouds can I save different clouds without the balance of the picture, (transparent background)  for latter reuse in other pictures?

Answer 1

Hi,
For the first problem, you can always make a sunset reflection in the Sea(water)
what you need to do is:
Apply the Sunset preset on the sky first. Select the Sky and alone and create a layer via copy of the sky. Now merge the sunset adjustment layer and the sky layer .and invert it vertically to cover the sea.Decrease the opacity of the layer to create a sunset reflection in the Sea. Add Liqufy filter to give some waves to the reflection.
For  the second thing, if you want to save some clouds for future use, you just need to cut out the clouds from the existing images and save them to a new image with transparent background. Make sure  you save them as a Png, psd, Tiff or Giff. These formats will preserve the transparency, while saving the image as Jpeg will fill the transparent pixels with white color. After you have theclouds saved, when you need to add them to any image, you just need to open the cloud image along with the other image and drag the cloud image to the target image.
You will have the cloud onto your new image.
Cheers
Swarnima