Tools of the Trade Class

This is what we will create:

 

1. Download the two original files: moon.psd and paris.psd
2. Open them in Photoshop
3. We will begin by working on paris.psd to begin with
4. First, let’s create a copy of our “background” layer. To do this, in the “layers” palette, click and grab the “background” layer, dragging it over the “Create a new layer” icon. If you are successful, you will have a new layer called “Background Layer Copy”

Photoshop Tip: If you can’t find or see your “layers” palette, you can find it under the “windows” menu. You might have to turn it on a couple times in case it is hidden underneath an already existing palette.

5. Now lets rename out new layer. Double click directly onto the words “Background Copy” and a highlighted text box should appear allowing you to change the layer name. Change the name to “Paris”.
6. Then, turn off the layer visibility of your original “Background” layer by clicking on the “eyeball” icon next to the “Background” layer. Your layer palette should look like this (minus the red boxes of course):

7. Now we are going to delete the sky using the magic wand tool. The magic wand tool is the fourth one in the tool palette.

8.  The magic wand tool works by selecting pixels of the same color range. The “tolerance” determines hoe many like pixels the magic wand tool selects. The higher the tolerance = the more pixels selected. The sweet spot of this tool is the tip of the wand.
9. For this exercise, set your tolerance at 32. The tolerance can be found in the options bar on top of the file.
10.  Clicking once, will not select all the blue in the sky. To select all the whole sky, hold “shift” and continue clicking with your mouse all the unselected blue until all the sky is selected. It should look similar to this when done:

11.  Make sure your “Paris” layer is selected. Your layer should be in blue and the layer title in bold if it’s selected.
12. Now press “delete” and “command+d” to release your selection

13.  Now we will use our “eraser” tool to erase our orange circle (the original moon). Select the eraser tool (the 11^th tool down) and paint over the orange dot.

14.  Now we are ready to bring in our new moon
15.  Open moon.psd, if it’s not already open
16.  We only want to copy over the moon, not the moon and the black background to our new Paris image. The easiest way to do this is to use our magic wand tool and select the black background.
17.  Now go under the “select” menu and select “inverse”.
18. To make sure we get rid of any straggling black pixels around our moon, we are going to go back under our “Select” menu and “modify” > “contract” our selection by 2 pixels.
19.  Now that our moon is selected, we are ready to bring it into our Paris image. The easiest way to bring the moon image onto the Paris image is to drag it. So stack your moon and Paris image like this on your screen if you can:

        20.  Using the “black arrow” tool, click onto the selected moon and drag it onto the Paris image. The trick to getting this to work is to make sure you drag the lily pads image all the way onto the laptop image. If you don’t Photoshop will yell at you saying “Could not complete your request because the layer is locked.” If you are successful, your moon will be over the Eiffel tower. You can use the black arrow tool to move the moon. Now you should have something like this. Notice there is a new layer in your “layers” palette.

21.  Let’s relabel our “Layer 1” as “moon”.  Remember to relabel the layer, we will simply double click directly on the words “Layer 1”
22.  Now lets move our “moon” layer underneath our “Paris” layer by clicking and dragging the “moon” layer underneath our “Paris” layer in our layers palette. Your moon should now be behind the Eiffel tower.
23.  Our moon is still rather large, so let’s resize it. Make sure you are on the “moon” layer and go “command+t” or “Edit”> “Free Transform”. Now you should see a box around your moon and you should be able to grab the corners of the box to resize your moon.

Remember – holding down “shift” will keep your moon proportional and keep it from getting distorted when you resize it.

24.  Now we can turn on our “Background Layer” in our layers palette so we have our moon in a blue sky instead of a checkerboard.
25. You will notice our original little orange moon came back. We want to get rid of that and edit our background layer. First we have to make our background layer editable. To do that, we are going to double click on the words “background layer” in our layers palette. In the dialogue box that appears, we are going to label this layer “sky”. Your picture and layers palette should now look something like this:

26.  Now were ready to get rid of our orange dot of a double moon.
27.  We are going to use the clone stamp tool. It’s the 9^th tool down and looks like a rubber stamp.

28.  There are a couple tricks to using the clone stamp tool. First- it’s a two-click process. Just like using a regular stamp, you stamp once on the inkpad to load the stamp with ink, than you stamp onto the paper. Here it’s the same process only you hold down the “option” or “alt” key when you are loading your pixels. Second - This tool duplicates pixels exactly, so be careful where you pick pixels to duplicate. Third – use this tool sparingly. The eye is really good at picking up duplicate patterns in an image and it doesn’t take much use of the clone stamp tool to make an image look weird. So back to our image.
29.  Select the clone stamp tool
30.  You will notice in the top options bar that you can change your tool brush size. My default brush is a 21pt soft edged brush. For this exercise, I’m going to change that brush to a 19pt hard edge brush.
31.  Now I’m going to load my stamp tool with pixels. Kind of like loading my stamp with ink from an inkpad. To do this, I’m going to position my cursor directly next to the orange dot, and holding the “option” or “alt” key, click with my mouse. If I forget to hold the “option” key, Photoshop will yell at me saying, “Could not use the clone stamp because the area to clone has not been defined (option-click to define a source point).

32.  Now that I’ve told Photoshop what pixels I want to duplicate, I can now duplicate those pixels by simply placing my cursor over my orange dot. Now my orange dot should be gone.
33. Lastly, we are going to adjust the color of our moon using an adjustment layer. Adjustment layers are additional layers that affect a layer or select and can be edited later unlike making adjustments using the “adjustment” menu.
34. Since we only want our adjustment layer to affect our moon, we are going to have to select our moon first.
35.  Just like when we selected the moon in it’s original file, moon.psd, it’s going to be easier to select the empty pixels around the moon rather then the moon itself.
36.  So, make sure you are on the “moon” layer, and using the magic wand tool, select anywhere but on the moon.
37. Now since we want our moon selected, we will need to inverse our selection.  Go “Select” > “Inverse”. Now only your moon should be selected.
38.  Adjustment layers are in the layers palette on the bottom row of icons. It looks like a ying/yang symbol. We will want to create a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer.
39.  In the dialogue box that comes up, I gave my moon a hue of 56, saturation of 24, and lightness of +19 and I checked the colorize box. Your image should look like this:

40.  You can double click on that layer to adjust the colors later if you wish.
41.  And now we are done! What a brilliant picture of Paris!!