replacing the sky with clouds

[rpcrowe]

Here is a shot that I took especially for this post and a shot of clouds that I want to insert where there is the blank sky.* I have read several books but, cannot seem to understand how I can do it.* This seems like an easy shot to replace the sky because it doesnt have a lot of trees or extraneous ragged stuff on the skyline.*

I am a duffer with Photoshop.* i know how (well, kind of) to use the Magic Wand and the Magnetic Lasso to select the sky. What else should I do.* I assume that I should be working with layers.* I have a little familiarity with layers also.

I have Photoshop 7 and also Photoshop Elements 3

[dc2]

I deliberately distorted your clouds but .
Are you using a PC or mac?

[Mr. Pickles]

A simple way for your particular example is below. I think this is the easy way to go since your mountain image has a blue sky, and the mountains form a nice "line" with no blue stuff touching the sky.

Open the mountain image,and open the cloud image.
In the cloud image, hit CTRL-A (select all), and the CTRL-C (copy).
Switch to the mountain image.
Hit CTRL-V (paste), which should place the clouds on a seperate layer.
Move that layer around till you have it where you want it (it can be moved up and out of the canvas if need be. Also, you could use Edit-Transform to scale it up, distort it, etc.)
Turn the clouds layer off.
Switch the active layer to the original mountains layer.
Using Magic Wand, set tolerance to about 50, with Continous checked.
Click on the blue sky.
If everything in the sky is selected, move on, else, use CTRL-Click on the other blue ares to include them.
Now go to the Selection pulldown, and choose Modify - Expand, with a pixel distance of one (for your image).
That should increase the selected area by one pixel, which is basically getting and stray bits the Magic Wand didn't.
Now hit the Delete key on the keyboard (should have a checkerboard area where the sky was).
Turn ON the cloud layer, and you should see a perty image.

Now, there are other ways to do it, especially using the Background Eraser, but for your example, since it is a simple clean one, the above will work. Always more than one way to do anything in PS