To phwall: spotlight

[macjake]

Hey Peter!
great to hear from you
how on earth did you make that light appear!
photoshop is not my strongsuite.
i like both photos, with and without the light.
thanks alot! much apprciated
now tell me how u did that!
cheers
craig

[phwall]

Hey Craig,
A couple of questions before we get into the method, what version of Photoshop do you have, are you on a PC or a Mac.
Pete

[macjake]

I have photoshop elements 9
and i'm on a laptop windows 7

[phwall]

Craigy boy,
I'll download Elements 9 and have a look at what it can do. In Photoshop cutting and pasting the spotlight is a very simple thing to do using the Marquee tool.

Pete

[phwall]

Hi Craig,
Ok, here's what you do.
1. Open the photograph in Elements.
2. Blow up the image, (hold down the Ctrl key and hit the + sign until you get the image of the spotlight up to a reasonable working size.
3. hold down the space bar and use your mouse to drag the image around until you have the spotlight in the middle of the working area.
4. Select your marquee tool, (5th one down in tools palette, it's the square with the dotted line around it). Hold down the left mouse key and prescribe a dotted line around the light, now you should have a dotted line around the white part of the spotlight. Now right click with the cursor inside the dotted line, a palette will pop up. Select Layer via copy.
5. Select the move tool, (first one in the tools palette) a dotted line with little boxes around it will appear where you first made the square with the Marquee tool. Place your cursor in the middle of the dotted square and drag the layer down to the spotlight without the light on. Release the mouse key.
6. The dotted line with the squares and a little tag coming out of the bottom will appear. Drag the edges of the square out until you have stretched the image to cover the spotlight, now use the little tag at the bottom of the dotted square to rotate the image so that it fits the spotlight.
7. Go to the Layers menu at the top and open that. Go to Flatten image. It's the last one in the list.
8. Voila, pretty easy eh.

Let me know if you have any problems.

By the way, do you use Save to Web to get your images down to TE size. If you don't let me know and I'll talk you through it. You need to use this to get optimum quality for posting onto TE.

Best wishes
Peter

[macjake]

hi Peter

i'll be sure to give it a try,
i appreciate the work and time you put into it for me...
i'll let you know!!

thanks buddy
craig