Tellywellies posted a photo of last week's supermoon in the Photo a Day thread - to save you looking it up, the image is here:
http://tinyurl.com/6g6t3xxI really liked that, and I wondered what would happen if I merged it in some way with another image. Hmm... A while ago I took some pictures of the West Pier (what's left of it) at Brighton & Hove. Here's one of the photos I took SOTC (straight out of the camera):
http://tinyurl.com/6yxnwq4So I put the two together and what I got was this:
What I did:
1. I got Tellywellies' permission to use his image.
2. Using Photoshop, I opened my image of the pier and converted it from being a "background" to an ordinary layer.
3. I pasted the moon on top of it, as layer 2.
4. I selected the moon layer and chose the drop down blend option "Difference" - this compares the colours in both images and removes some based on brightness, and black/white content.
5. I then added a gradient map at 10% opacity just to add a warm tint (layer 3).
6. I merged all three layers, and set the selection tool to circle - then holding down the Shift key I selected the "moonblend" as a perfect circle and made a copy of the selection (CTRL+C) which I then pasted (CTRL+V) on to the image as layer 4.
7. With the circle still selected, I added a 3 pixel "stroke" around the edge, partly because the edge of the moon wasn't sharp (because in real life the light of the moon is diffused) and partly because it acts as a frame to hold the image together. The stroke used a colour selected from the blended image. Then I deselected the circle. (If you deselect circles too soon it can be a nightmare to do another one with exactly the same dimensions - been there, regretted that.)
8. Then using the "eye" in the layers menu, I deselected the merged image (i.e. the original three layers that I had merged into one, not the moon on its own) so that it didn't show and added a new transparent layer underneath the blended moon. I then picked a darker colour from the blended moon and used the paintbucket tool to fill the transparent layer.
9. I cropped the image so that it was square and saved it as a JPG file.
Et voila!