The Dog in the Moon
On a clear night, most cameras
will be able to capture a nice image of the moon for you. Check out this
beautiful image.
We've all heard of the man in the moon, but the dog in the moon? Look closely...
Yep, it's Beauregard again. Still hanging around on my hard drive waiting to be abused by me with Photoshop Elements.
Let's fire up Adobe Photoshop Elements and bring the picture into the program.
Make sure that you're using Full Edit and not Quick Fix so that you have all of the options available to you.
With a little editing and some technique, the final image becomes very possible.
First...the original moon photo had the black sky in the background. I'd like to get rid of it. The first inclination for most people is to take the oval tool and try to draw an oval around the desired portion. Let's shift gears and not think about the moon, but rather the sky around it.
From the tool bar, I'm going to select the magic wand tool.
This unique tool lets you click in an area and it magically selects all of the adjacent areas that have the same colour. Click on the black area of the image and everything EXCEPT the moon will be selected. You could then just delete the background.
But, I'd like to have just the moon. So, keeping in mind that everything except the moon is selected, from the SELECT Menu, choose INVERSE. Photoshop Elements will drop the highlighting of the background and select everything else (i.e. the moon) instead.
This is good. I'd like my resulting image to be exactly the same size as the moon itself, so I'll copy the selected area and start a new document. Elements will create a new document with exactly the right dimensions of the selected area. Go with the defaults, paste your clipboard and your new document will be exactly the right size and will contain the moon only. It's a slick technique and makes sure that you don't include those unsightly background artifacts when you're working with images.
So now we have the moon..keep it open and next, it's the dog.
I open the dog image and with the elliptical marquee tool, I'll select his head and copy it.
Select the moon image and paste. What you'll have now is the moon in the background with this moon-shaped dog's head sitting on top of it. If you look at your layers panel (Window | Layers if it's not visible), you'll see that our work as two layers to it. In fact, Beau's head is in the top layer and we can still use the selector tool and move him around if we like.
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And I'd like to. I'm going to move him over so that he's over top of the moon.
For effect, I'm going to move my cursor to the right of the middle-right selection box until the cursor turns to a rotational cursor and rotate him counter-clockwise a bit.
So far, so good. The final step is to blend the two images together. In this case, the dog head makes most sense since it's obviously the darker of the two. Make sure that the head is selected and go back to the layers window. At the top, you'll see a little slider with the label Opacity.
Adjust the Opacity until you get the blend that works for you. When you're ready, from the File Menu, save your document as a Photoshop Document (*.psd) to preserve the layers or Save for the Web (*.jpg or *.gif) to flatten all of the layers and make the image ready for viewing in a web page or desktop document.
Think of all of the fun that you can have with images and creating your own literacy masterpieces.
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