Many times, what you need for your project does not exist. In this particular case, you find you really need a convincing sunset to advertise this new housing development in the hills outside Santa Fe. As with most things Santa Fean, much of what they do is image as opposed to reality. Because sunsets in New Mexico are so much a part of the ambiance, one seems appropriate here.
You have a landscape of an actual view from one of the building lots. You found an old photo of a sunset. It is time to combine them. The client is certainly not going to pay for a new, custom photograph (as if you could even predict when the exact right sunset was going to occur.
As we get started, the first thing to take care of is the fact that we are eventually going to need this landscape on a layer where we can make the sky go transparent. So, drag the background image to the new layer icon at the bottom of the Layer palette. Then rename the new layer Landscape. The select the Background layer; set the foreground/background colors to black and white by clicking the little icon in the lower left corner of the swatches on the toolbox (look above); choose Edit>> Select All; the hit Delete/Backspace to clear all the color in the background to white.
Now, you need to get rid of the sky. Remember, anything selected and deleted (with white as the background color on the older versions) goes transparent. So take the magic wand, set it at a high enough tolerance to get almost all of the sky. Use marquees or the wand to get the rest, then Delete.
With the layer selected, choose Layer>> Matting. I used Remove White Matte twice, and I Defringed at 3 pixels. Then I selected the Landscape layer (Command/Control-clicked on the layer). Then I used Select>> Modify>> Border, with a border of three pixels. I used the Marquee selection tool holding down the Option/Alt to remove the selections around the sides of the image. Then I blurred the edge until it looked something like this. (Obviously I made the background black for contrast, to show you the edge better.)
Now we need to get the color right. Click on the Landscape layer icon in the Layers palette and drag it down to the New Layer icon at the bottom of the palette to make a copy of the layer. Then change the blending mode to Multiply. Obviously, when you back out to look at it (if you have changed the Background to a black fill), there is a real problem with those two distant mountains. The robin-egg's blue has to go. Select, delete, and blur the edges here also. The final result, should look something like this:
Now we need to go get the sunset. Click on the image below (PC: right-click), and save it to your hard drive to work on. Open it in Photoshop.
So under Image>> Rotate Canvas choose Flip Horizontal. Now select the Cropping tool, Fixed size, 5.753" wide, 1.6" tall, 300 dpi. Select approximately the area shown.
After it is cropped, Select All; copy to the Clipboard; make your landscape active; make a new layer; Paste in the sunset; Move it into position; Clean it up and crop to your liking. The result should be something like this:
Although mine was a deeper red.
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