I was asked to explain how I made a lighthouse into a banana, and turned day into night.I started with this:
Now, I didnt have any idea how to do it when I started, but with a lot of experimenting I arrived at this result:
First thing is to get rid of the lighthouse. I decided to use some parts of it, the stairs, the balcony and the top, so I cut those out, and placed them all on different layers.Now, to get rid of the lighthouse: take a rectangular selection from the sky and sea in the background, and cover half of the lighthouse with it:
(Dont worry about that red square, its just there to show you whats going on.)Then take another one from the other side, and cover the other half. Drag and stretch and warp until the sky looks coherent, and take away the sharp edges with a soft eraser. You should end up with something like this:
Then merge the three layers to make a single background layer, and insert a banana. After you have removed the banana from where ever you inserted it, find a banana image and paste it onto where the lighthouse used to be.
Now for the layers of steps and balcony, etc. They need some warping to fit the banana, and I also flipped them to match the light on the banana, which comes from the left. Mask out every bit of lighthouse that might be left.
Okay, then we get to the fun part: How to make this look interesting.First, I think the banana looks a little too clean. If it had been standing by the sea like that for a long time, it would have been more corroded. (Well, if it was a real banana it would of course have rotted away, but lets imagine its a steel banana or something.So I took the first steps from this great tutorial by mzpresto, and made the banana look a little more rugged and weather-beaten:
A lighthouse without light is no fun, and you don't see light unless it's dark, which philosophically is rather interesting... but anyway, we need to make it night-time!Just making the image dark wont work. We need some perspective, since the horizon in the background would appear darker than the cliff in the foreground.Make a selection of the foreground, (the cliff and the sea near to it) and copy it onto a new layer, which well use for later. Now, with your background layer turned on, go to filter>render>lighting effects.
This is a bit tricky, since there are lots of settings to play around with, and you only get a very small preview. Well be doing the light later, now just concentrate on darkness. Turn off the spotlight, and set your settings the way you want them. If it doesnt work first time, undo the step and try again. The lighting effects only affects your background, so your banana will be way too light now. Make a copy of the banana, and turn brightness down. Then mask out the left side, where the light will be falling.You should wind up with something like this:
Now for the light.On a new layer, make a selection with your polygonal lasso tool, and fill it with white. Then go to filter>blur>Gaussian blur, and blur it out. You might want to make it more yellowish, so, on another new layer, do the same thing with a yellow colour that you like. Like this:
Now get your ellipse tool, and, on a new layer, make a white circle around the windows of the lighthouse. Apply Gaussian blur, and then make another one with yellow.
I decided to only have light coming out of one side of the lighthouse, for a more dramatic effect. Same light on both sides would blur out the shadows. Oh, right, shadows! Very important, dont forget them. The easiest way to control them is painting them (on a new layer, of course) with black, opacity turned down to about 40%. But for the stairs that was very difficult, so I simply copied the stairs, flipped the copy and turned brightness all the way down. Then I warped it to fit the shape the shadow would cast.
Finally, we take our foreground layer, and start masking on it to reveal the darker layer below, so it would appear that it is being lit up from above. If you want to, you can go in and paint some yellowish colour on top of it, to make it glow more. (Just remember to do that on a new layer, right?)And thats about it. Heres the final image: