Tutorial: AKVIS Chameleon

Moonlight sonata

The author of the tutorial is Philipp Schuster. He has made a photo collage in Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.

The creation of the photo collage didn't take long as he used the plug-in AKVIS Chameleon.

• Step 1. Open the photos to be used in the collage in your photo editor. Here we have a photo of the sky, a photo of the Moon and a monument.
• Step 2. Activate the Magic Wand tool and set its Tolerance parameter to 40. Select the sky by clicking it with the left mouse button. Since we want to select the monument, not the sky, we should invert the selection by calling the command Select -> Inverse.
  
• Step 3. Copy the selection and paste it into the photo of the sky. You can do it in two ways: either by using the command of the menu Edit (first copy the selection using the command Copy, then paste it into the photo with the sky using the command Paste) or using the hot-keys (copy - Ctrl+C, paste - Ctrl+V).
  
• Step 4. Adjust the size and position of the pasted object. For the fragment to be true to the mood of the final photo we should align the monument over the picture so that the people are not visible.

  To change the position of the monument activate the tool Move and drag the monument with the left mouse button pressed.

  To change the size of the object use the command Transform - Scale from the menu Edit. You will see a frame with markers around the object. Use the left mouse button to drag one of the corner markers. The ratio will stay the same if you keep the Shift key pressed during the drag transfer.

  Having set the dimensions of the monument, press the button Enter or the button in the Options palette.

  
• Step 5. Select the Moon using the Elliptical Marquee tool. In fact we can see only a part of the Moon on the photo but we will select the moon as a whole.
  
• Step 6. Copy the Moon and paste it into the right upper corner of the main image. Now we call the plug-in AKVIS Chameleon, select the comand AKVIS - Chameleon in the menu item Filter.
  

  The plug-in does not have an interface. It will be applied as soon as you call it from the menu. The software will smooth the borders of the pasted object and adjust its color range to the background.

• Step 7. When the plug-in AKVIS Chameleon is over with its job, merge the layers by selecting the command Merge Visible in the menu item Layer.

  Then call the plugin Lighting Effects by selecting the command Filter - Render. In the window of the Lighting Effects the light source is set on the Moon, the Intensity parameter is set to 14, all other parameters stay the same.

  

  Now we press the button Ok and the photo collage is ready.