This article is for beginners. Here you will learn how to simply add an element to your photo and turn a day image into a night image.

Open your selected image in Photoshop

Object  Choose a photo of a mountain (in raw format). To open it, go to File> Open, a window will open where you can select the desired photo. Here we select the raw mountain file

First we make the initial settings

Since we opened a raw file, Adobe Camera Raw appears and we intend to re-configure it to look like night. Let’s adjust the white balance to blue, so change the Temp slider to 4150. You want your exposure to be very low, so it looks dark, try Highlights to 84 – increase contrast to 39, Blacks to 28, and Whites to 46. Basically, lower the light parts and increase the darker parts to create a night effect.

Now click on the .. ProPhoto sentence below your photo and open it in Photoshop as a smart object.

Add custom elements

When you have finished the previous task, you can open an image or element again to add to the first image. We are going to choose a month that we want to add to this mountain. Go to File> Open and select a photo of a month in jpg format.

Adjust the work environment

You should have photos of the moon and mountains in the top tabs of the Photoshop UI. If you do not see this, you can go to Window> Arrange> Consolidate all tabs

For this tutorial we need a workspace with two windows on the right, one showing Layers and one for Properties. To do this, you need to select “3D” from the Workspace drop-down menu in the upper right corner. Like the image below:

Transfer the moon to the image of the mountain

Go to the moon image and select the Move tool, the first icon on the left (toolbar) is the V keyboard shortcut.

With the Move tool you have to click on the moon, hold your mouse button, drag it to the mountain tab and release it.

Combine images together

You can see that the previous image is still black around the moon, in the layer window there are several options for Blending Modes, for this one we want to use Screen. Drag it down and select Screen from the options.

To resize the moon, go to the opposite menu Edit> Free Transform.

To maintain its ratio by holding down the shift key, you can expand it by grabbing the corner of the moon and dragging it.

You can also move the moon or other element around to place it where you want it. It looks very cool. To select and move layers, you can click on the eye next to the layers in the Layers menu

Select the W Quick Selection tool on your keyboard and drag the mouse over the sky to select it

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Turn the moon layer back on and click on the small square icon at the bottom to create the mask layer. The red part is shown in the photo below

This creates a mask and that is why we choose the moon, part of the moon is now hidden

If you want to replace the moon, all you have to do is select the moon layer and click the chain button on the right to remove the moon image from the mask link.

Note that if you make a mistake, you can select Ctrl + Z to undo or undo the last step.

Great settings

You can see that there is a color difference around the moon due to the layer, so to fix it, select the Brush tool (by hitting B on the keyboard) or on the tool palette.

Make sure the opacity is 100% and black is your foreground color. Right-click and set the hardness to zero. This makes the brush very soft and you can move the white areas on it to remove them.

Note: Note the Alt + Ctrl keys to make your brush or any other tool in Photoshop smaller or larger.

 

the end ! You succeeded. You have added a month to your landscape!