What’s wrong with this picture?

Ithink it’s obvious what the problem is with this picture. The white sky is uninteresting and boring. I photographed the wild orangutan in Kalimantan, the Indonesia state in Borneo. The sky was overcast and in the picture it completely blew out, i.e., became solid white.

With this kind of extreme contrast, it’s easy for the new feature Edit > sky replacement in replace the sky even with the ultra fine hair seen along the edges of the orang’s body. The problem, though, is the out of focus branches hanging down on the right side of the frame. The reason that’s a problem is because if I replace the white background with a sharp picture of the sky, the focus throughout the picture wouldn’t make sense. By that I mean no camera lens in the world could take a picture where the primate is sharp, and then several feet into the picture the branches are out of focus, and then the sky is sharp. That’s not possible.

Therefore, before I replaced the sky, I had to clone out the soft branches completely. To do that, I used the brush tool and painted white wherever there were less-than-sharp leaves.

Then, I opened Filter > sky replacement and scrolled through my sky pictures. Notice I added a background that included the tops of trees in a distant forest. I did that purposely to help frame the orangutan and to give a sense of environment to the shot. Instead of the animal being suspended in the air -- which it really was -- the tree tops added some context.

If I wanted to add more branches to the right side of the frame, they would have to be sharp. Then, I would turn them into a silhouette and place them to balance the picture and to complete the framing of the animal. §