Creating clouds

This evening I was driving home after visiting a friend and thoroughly enjoying the experience. The traffic was thick and slow and everyone seemed to be on the road and yet I was enjoying being out there. The reason? The light was fading and the sky was changing colour and the few clouds were getting more beautiful by the second. As I turned off the highway onto the quiet road that leads to home (and, if I failed to turn off to home, up into the mountains) the sky had a distinct orange rim along the dark horizon; and although the rest of the sky was varying shades of blue, the clouds were also tinged with orange.
I did wish that I had my good camera with me and the chance to take a photograph. One thought led to another and I worked out that I could actually create my own sunset and coloured clouds. I did not need to regret not having a camera!
I will show you how to create your own sunset!
Whenever I see a sky with good clouds and I have my point and shoot camera handy I take lots of photos. Its a good thing to do when you are the passenger in the front seat of the car!

Open the picture in Photoshop and as long as you have version CS3 or higher you will be able to access Adjustments>Black and White.
Drag the cyan and the blue sliders to the left to convert the blue sky to jet black. Make sure that you do not darken the shadow area in the cloud too much. Tweak the cyan slider so that the edge of the cloud is "clean".

This image is to be converted into a brush. If you take a look at your brushes they are black shapes inside a white background. So.... Image >Adjustments > Invert. This will give you a black cloud inside a white background. Crop the cloud taking the boundary as close as you can to the edge of the cloud.
You will not be able to make a brush if the image is too large. Go to Image>Image size and change it to 1000 pixels width (have height and width constrained) and change the resolution to 96 pixels per inch.
Now click on Edit>Define Brush Preset. A little box will appear asking you what you want to call this brush.
 Call it cloud 1 (the next one you do will be cloud 2!)

 You now have a brush at the bottom of all the brush shapes that will give you the cloud shape whenever you use it.
I created a sunset similar to the one I saw on my drive this evening and chose the colour on the horizon as my foreground colour and this is what I created from two different cloud brushes (you will recognise the brush I have just shown you in construction)

One tip - when you use the cloud brushes always paint on a new layer. If you decide you have put in too many clouds you can delete the layer and add another and start again. I usually apply each cloud on a new layer then they can be moved and resized.
Another useful reason for putting the cloud on a new layer is that the colour can be changed (for daytime stick to white or light grey) with my cloud colour I was able to go to Hue and Saturation and change the colour to match the light over the horizon.
These orange clouds look really artificial, don't they? I can assure you that this is how the sky was as I drove home. Truly extraordinary - gorgeous!
AJ