How to make the moon a little bigger?

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
August 26, 2018
4 replies
4126 views

Hi,

I am struggling with something that I know is fairly easy: how to make the moon a little bigger. See image below. I'd like to enlarge the moon by 25-50%.

I've tried making a selection with the rectangular or elliptical marquee tool. Then using either transform>scale, or free transform, or content-aware transform, when I make the selection larger, I see the edge of the selection. I've tried feathering the selection, but that's not working--I still see the selection after it is enlarged. Should I be duplicating the background layer perhaps?

Thanks for any help with this!

John

EDIT: I tried duplicating the background layer and using free transform with the selection feathered. That works pretty well, but perhaps there is an even better technique. Thanks!

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Ameteur Ps Artist

Known Participant

Personally, I would have searched in Adobe Assets, or public domain stock photos and placed a moon there. Simply because, depending on the quality of the photo, when you stretch it it gets really pixelated, and sometimes you can fix it, and many times we can't.

davescm

Community Expert

Hi

As others have said, I would replace the moon.

Use the spot healing brush to remove the old moon.

Set the new moon to screen

Adjust the color with a curve/Hue &Sat layer

Add in the clouds over the moon face

Don't forget to reflect the larger moon in the water surface

Dave

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

I like your attention to detail Dave, brushing the clouds back over the new moon.

barbara_a7746676

Community Expert

As Dennis said, upsampling is not a good idea. But you might be able to get away with it in this case because the moon doesn't have much detail and if you don't increase the moon size more than 120%, and possibly give it just a small amount of gaussian blur.

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

Because upressing is usually not a good idea because of pixelation, if it was my picture, I'd photograph the moon again, and composite.

you can see in this example, that I did not try and select the moon, but set the layer blend mode to Lighten which made the black become transparent (because it is darker than the image pixels behind it).

If you want to use Free Transform and avoid the hard edge, make the selection a little loose, and use Feather Selection (F5) to blur the outer pixels

Copy the selection to a new layer, and use FT to make it bigger. There is no had edge here.

Note: I did try this without copying to a new layer, but it resulted in this brighter fringe. I might have blurred the selection a touch too much, but otherwise, I am not sure why that happened. davescm anyone?

[EDIT] OK I have found out that caused the bright collar. There was a 3 pixel feather set in the Options bar. I hate trying to use this laptop for Photoshop as I can see WTH is going on :-(