Dishonesty in Landscape Photography: Sky Replacement Without Mention

“I’m a photographer, and I took this photo”. If you haven’t heard that popular audio clip for Instagram Reels yet, consider yourself lucky. The rest of us became annoyed by it long ago. Perhaps that’s at least in part because of its conspicuous redundancy - if you’re a photographer on Instagram, I’m never really going to expect that an image you share is anything other than a photo you took. And if it is indeed something different, it is then that I would figure you’d specify what it was we were actually looking at. In other words, if my Instagram bio says I’m a photographer, isn’t the aforementioned phrase implied for every image I share? Surely that’s at least what my audience would assume. For that same reason, it boggles my mind that so many landscape photographers are replacing skies in their photos without making any mention of it. It’s dishonest.

Conversations around sky replacement abound, and I’ve read plenty of them on social media and other blogs, and watched Youtube videos covering it, and I’ve noticed that inevitably there’s a string of irrelevant arguments that pop up when talking specifically about being honest when a sky is replaced. As quick examples, it seems someone is bound to chime in with something along the lines of, “Landscape photography isn’t photojournalism“ or “Everyone edits their photos”. I agree with both of these statements, and they certainly deserve discussion, however they don’t really apply to the point being made here. I’m simply stating that it’s dishonest for someone who calls themselves a photographer to replace a sky in a photo and not mention that when presenting their image to an audience. For a broader look at dishonesty in landscape photography, I highly recommend you read this blog post by Matt Payne. I was really impressed with how comprehensive it is, and he does a great job drawing on other sources and helping us understand various talking points around lying about landscape photography.

I want to make it very clear that I have no problem whatsoever with sky replacement, or any manipulation to photos for that matter. Photography is art, and there are no rules. I obviously have no authority to draw lines as to what is acceptable and what is not, but if I did, I would most definitely say, “There are no lines”. Everything is acceptable. Artists should feel free to create whatever they want, however they want to, without feeling any need to limit themselves (unless of course you are entering a contest or something of that sort where there may be rules or guidelines).

Of course, since there are no rules, art itself often lies, and I think it could be argued that’s actually an important element of it. However, lying in art is very different from lying about our art, and if we as photographers are swapping skies without mentioning it, that’s exactly what we are doing, by deceiving our audience into believing what they are seeing is a beautiful moment in nature that was captured, when in fact it is not. In thinking about all of this, I drew comparisons to something I heard Penn Jillette, of the world famous magic duo Penn & Teller say: "Some magicians like to blur the line. We are of the tradition of wanting very much to be honest about the fact that we are lying. We don't want anyone to leave the theater believing something that we know not to be true.” Perhaps this is an odd comparison to make since the magician’s art is actually intended to deceive viewers, but I think the sentiment here applies. To me it seems that a photographer swapping skies without saying that was done is intentionally misleading their audience and wanting people to believe that the image was a moment in time that they witnessed.

Now, sky swapping is nothing new, so why does it seem to be talked about more as of late? Because post processing software has made it easier than ever in recent years to replace the sky in photos. Multiple programs have had specific tools for it for years, including the popular Luminar. But in the more widely used Photoshop, you had to learn at least one of many methods and get some practice to get good at making believable images. As of October 2020, however, an automatic sky replacement tool was added. Now, with little time and effort, anybody can swap in a sky from a different place and a different day.

Just last week, I tried the tool out. It was my first time trying any sky replacement, and it was super fun. I was shocked by the extreme simplicity. If you haven’t noticed by now, you can grab the bar on any of the images on this page to see the original photo versus the new version with a more dramatic sky dropped in using this tool. All of the landscape and sky photos were taken by me. I was able to create the enhanced images in a short time. In fact, I literally got out a stopwatch app, and found that the whole process for each one took me on average about 30 seconds. You just load in your landscape photo with a boring sky, select a photo with a better sky, and ouala! Photoshop detects the sky and swaps in the secondary photo. The majority of the time it took me was spent browsing out to select the source image for the sky. I should note that while I didn’t spend much time considering the colors and light dynamics to ensure the end results were realistic, there are various ways within the tool that you can tweak the foreground and sky so they match. That said, it generally does a great job automatically, even making some tonal adjustments in your foreground to be harmonious with the selected sky.

When the sky is replaced in images like these, we’ve left the realm of any sort of gray areas in photo editing, such as tweaking the saturation or removing footprints from sand dunes. We can no longer honestly say, “Here’s a photo I took”, which is in my opinion exactly what is implied when we label ourselves photographers. I will always be an advocate for honesty in landscape photography, and I hope we will not be afraid to have healthy discussion around it in the community. I’ll leave this all with another quote I love from Penn Jillette: “I think that sharing the truth with other people matters. That’s all… It matters for aesthetic purposes, artistic purposes, emotional purposes and I think it matters for morality”. Please feel free to share your thoughts surrounding sky replacement in landscape photography and add to the discussion in the comments.