Place a planet in the sky

Her is a fun little tutorial to finish out the year. I'll show you how to place a planet in the sky of a landscape. Lets begin

1-Get a landscape
Here is a photo of the Salt Lake valley looking south from Ensign Peak. I'm going to place a planet of my own creation in the background so as to make it look like its orbiting the Earth. When you do this you'll want to keep the angle of the sun in mind. The lighting of the planet to be used will determine how realistic the final image will turn out being.



2-Get a planet
Create a planet (See my tutorial) or get a planet, Saturn, Jupiter, the Moon, Mars from the internet. For this I made up a ringed planet. I saved it as a PNG file then going to File>Open as layers, Opened it as a layer into the Photo. then I saved the image as a new .XCF file. See below:


3-Place planet
I then positioned my planet in the place I want it to be on the horizon. I also had to re-size it a bit. Experiment until you get the position and size you want.


4-Change the layer mode and alter color
Going to the layer mode tab in the Layers palette change the planets layer-mode to 'Screen'.
Going to 'Color' in the menus, then 'Color balance', i made a color adjustment to the planet to more closely match the to yellowish tone of the building in the photo. See below:


5-Make the planet go behind the horizon
Create a layer mask on the planet layer. Using a fuzzy paint brush make invisible the parts of the planet that should be behind the horizon. I also painted out parts of the planet where there are clouds to increase the illusion.



Conclusion
There you have it. Now save your image as a .JPG file and send it to the printer. Your friends and family will get a kick out of the photo.



HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!