Photoshop : Tutorial – Adding a moon to your photographs

Jun 28, 2007 by Jennifer

Today I have a really quick and easy Photoshop tutorial that shows you how to add a moon from one picture to another and make it look authentic. All you need is the move tool, a bit of blending and a bit of transforming.

1. Open up the two photographs – one of the moon and the one that you want to add the moon too. To keep things nice and simple, use a sky with little or no clouds. I picked up this moon shot and the dishes from http://www.sxc.hu/ .

2. Select the Move Tool and click and drag the moon picture onto the other picture.

In this case, not only does the moon look massive but the sky is quite obviously a very different colour.

3. To fix the different sky colour, select the moon layer in the layers palette and set the blend mode to Lighten. This will hide the black sky and leave the moon visible.

The craters and areas of the moon that were dark now look a little bit transparent but once we resize the moon and then move it into a dark area of the sky it will look fine.

4. With the moon layer still selected, hit Ctrl + T (Windows) or Cmd + T (Mac) to transform it. You’ll see a bounding box appear around the moon. Hold down Shift and drag one of the corner handles (holding down Shift makes sure that object is resized proportionally) and resize the moon to a more suitable size. Drag the moon into a dark part of the sky. Press Enter or Return to complete the transformation.