From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

726 Creating an E.T. moon in Photoshop

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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726 Creating an E.T. moon in Photoshop

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- Hey gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. This week, we're going to use Photoshop to take an everyday average photograph of Earth's moon, and turn it into this E.T. style moon. Remember, in the movie E.T., when Elliott is escaping with the creature on his bicycle? Well, this is the moon right here. Now, in case you're wondering, "Why in the world "the Earth world, we would do such a thing?" It's all because eventually, we're going to be creating this awesome poster art. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. Alright, so here's the final version of the poster art, complete with the E.T. style moon, the silhouetted trees, and our bicycle-riding dinosaur. We're going to start off with this photograph of a full moon, which comes to us from the Dreamstime image library. About which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke.php. Alright, I'll go ahead and press the backspace key, or the delete key on a Mac to get rid of that url layer. Now we want to be able to colorize this moon with some very vivid colors indeed, but there's no way to colorize black. Black, by its very nature, is always black, no matter what the hue or saturation values are. And so, we need to start things off by brightening the blacks inside this image, and the best way to do that is to go up to the layer menu, choose New Adjustment Layer, and then choose the Levels command. That'll force the display of the new layer dialogue box, at which point I'll go ahead and name this layer lift black, let's say, and then I'll click OK. Next, inside the Properties dialogue box, you want to scroll down if necessary to these output levels values. Go ahead and click in the first one and press shift + up arrow, a total of five times in order to raise that value to 50. And what that's telling Photoshop is to increase the brightness of black to a luminous level of 50, which as you can see, is a dark gray. And that'll give us room to colorize this image. Alright, now I'll go ahead and hide the Properties panel, and then I'll shift + click on full moon, so both of these layers are selected. You do not want the title group to be selected. And then, go ahead and right click inside the image window with a rectangular marquee tool. It's very important that that tool is selected up here at the top of the tool box. And then, go ahead and choose Convert to smart object. Alright, now I want to crop the image so it measures 10 inches wide by 12 inches tall, and the easiest way to do that is to go up to the image menu and choose the Canvas Size command, which allows you to change the canvas independently of the image itself. So in other words, it allows you to crop. So I'll go ahead and choose that command, and then I'll change my units of measure to inches. And make sure the Relative checkbox is turned off and that the central anchor point is selected. And then, go ahead and change the width value to 10 inches, and the height to 12 inches, which is a pretty small poster, but it's going to work well for this specific file. At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK. Now Photoshop is going to warn me that because the new canvas size is going to be smaller than the current one, that some clipping will occur. Notice it saying "clipping will occur," meaning that we're going to permanently crop away pixels. That is in no way, shape, or form true. That's just not a true message, because we're working with layers. We're just temporarily cropping things. Doubly so because we're working with a smart object. So you can go ahead and click Proceed. Alright, now we'll go and zoom in, just by pressing Ctrl + 0, or Command + 0 on a Mac. And now, I want to scale and rotate my moon by going up to the edit menu and choosing the Free Transform command, which has the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl + T, or Command + T on the Mac. And now, you can modify your settings up here in the options bar. Now, I want to scale the moon proportionally, so I'll go ahead and click on this chain icon here. And then I'll change either the width or height value to 80%. So, we do want the moon to be a little smaller, but we want to keep it nice and large. Now I want to take this crater right here, which is known as the Tycho Crater, and I want to rotate it downward so it's right there at the bottom of the moon, which is exactly where it appears in the E.T. poster. And so I figured out that the best rotate value is four degrees. Now I want to position the moon high in the sky, and so I'll click on this Y value right there, so you can just click on the Y in order to select its value. Make sure this triangular delta icon is turned off. And then, if you're working along with me, you want to change this value to 1220, like so. So that the moon is nearly touching the top of the canvas. And then, press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, a couple of times to accept those changes. Alright, now we want to develop and colorize this photograph and the best way to do that is to go up to the filter menu and choose Camera Raw Filter, which will bring up the Camera Raw window. I'm going to go ahead and click inside this exposure value right there, and I'll press Shift + up arrow, to take that value up to positive 0.5. Then, I'll take the contrast value up to 50. And I'll take the highlights value up to 10, and the shadows value down to negative 50. Which is kind of working against that adjustment layer that we applied a couple of minutes ago, but it's going to end up looking great. Now I'll tab my way down to the Clarity value and I'll take it up to +80, so notice the difference between a clarity value of approximately 0 here, and a value of a hundred. We end up getting a lot more texture inside that moon. Now, I think that's a little bit too much, so I took the value down to +80. Now what you want to do is click on this icon right here. It's the fifth icon in, and it gives you access to the split toning controls. And now, just go ahead and crank the saturation values up, both for highlights and shadows, so that you can better see what you're doing. And I want the highlights to be kind of a cyan blue. And so I'm going to take that hue value up to 190 degrees, like so, at which point you can see that we're getting some pretty bizarre results, and that's because the shadows are currently colorized with a hue of 0, which is red. Now I want a little more saturation than this, so I'm going to take that saturation value up to 80%, and that just affects the highlights, by the way. So notice, if I change the balance here, so that 62% of the colors are considered to be highlights, that we get a lot more cyan colorization. If I take that balance value down, we're favoring the shadows. I want to leave that guy right there at 0. And then, I'll set the shadows value to 260 degrees, which gives us a kind of blueish violet. And then I'll set the saturation value to 90%. At which point, I'll go ahead and click OK in order to accept that change. Now notice that by default, Photoshop goes ahead and gives you a blank filter mask. We don't need that guy, and it's just cluttering up the panel, so I'll right click on it and choose delete filter mask in order to get rid of it. And now, I want to add a little bit of a glow to the moon. And so I'll go up the filter menu, choose Blur, followed by Gaussian Blur, and I'll go ahead and crank this radius value up to a hundred pixels. Which is a lot higher than I'd normally go, but it is going to allow us to create quite the glow. I'll go ahead and click OK to accept that change, and then I'll double click on this little sliders icon to the right of Gaussian Blur. So, the top of the two right here. In order to bring up the blend options dialogue box. And I'll change the mode to lighten. So that we're only keeping those blur colors that are lighter than the moon. At which point, I'll click OK. Now I want to force some perspective here, so I want the moon to be a little softer, and so I'll return to the filter menu, choose Blur, and then once again choose Gaussian Blur. And this time, I'll set the radius value to just six pixels, like so, and that does decrease the sharpness of that moon and it gives it more of an old school film quality. At which point, I'll click OK to accept that change. Alright, now I'm going to zoom in ever so slightly by selecting this zoom value in the bottom left corner of the window and changing it to 19%. You don't have to follow along with that, that just happens to work well for this particular video. Now at this point, you may say, "Well that does look like quite the moon," but we have this obvious problem down here. We have this transparency checkerboard showing up in the background. But bear in mind that the bottom portion of the poster will be covered in trees. And that's how you take a photograph of a full moon, and turn it into a bright, glowing E.T. moon, here inside Photoshop. Alright, now if you're a member of Lynda.com slash LinkedIn Learning, I have a follow-up movie, in which we take our E.T. style moon, and we're going to add this forest of trees in the foreground. We're going to bring 'em in from Illustrator, as it turns out, and then we're going to populate 'em. It's going to be great. If you're looking forward to next week, we're going to add in an element of another classic Spielberg movie, my personal favorite, Jurassic Park, as we replace Elliott and E.T. With the thing that presumably ate them, this T. Rex. Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.

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