Photoshop a UFO into a photo

This Photoshop CS5 tutorial will show you a simple process creating a UFO to add to your image.
Whether you believe UFO’s are real or not, with Photoshop anything is convincingly believable.
I will be using my own Photo for this Tutorial. You may use my photo or select a great photo of you own.

Step 1 – Open your desired photo and create a new layer.
(Ctrl Shift N) or Layer > New > Layer.
This new layer will be used for your UFO.

Step 2 – Make a selection shaped like a UFO.
We are going to draw some ovals to create the shape of the UFO.
Select the Elliptical Marquee Tool and draw a flat oval the size you want like so:

Now hold down Shift and draw a smaller Oval on the top of the previous oval
to make the top of the UFO  as shown below:
Tip: When holding down SHIFT when using a selection tool (like the elliptical Marquee Tool),  it will add to your previous selection.
Also when using a selection tool, holding down ALT will subtract from a  previous selection.

Step 3 – Add some color to your UFO.
Select the Gradient Tool (G) and select the black and white gradient.
Hold down shift and click and drag from the bottom to the top of your Dancing ants.

Step 4 - Add Shadows and details to your Flying Saucer:
First will add the shadows to the bottom of the Saucer.
Select the Brush Tool (B) and make it rather small (I used a 9 pixel soft brush)
hold down shift while dragging  left to right, across the bottom of the selection to add shadow and define
the bottom of the UFO.
Now select a medium gray (#848383) and decrease your brush size even smaller and hold  shift and draw
a gray line above the black line, like so:

Select a Darker Gray ( #464545) hold down Shift and draw a line at the point
the two ovals meet together like so:

Step 5 – use the dodge tool to add light source.
look at  other objects in your picture to see where  the highlights are at and replicate them.
select the Dodge tool (o) (using around a 19px soft brush)   and bring your exposure down to 30%, also  uncheck protect tones,now just
click and drag lightly to add highlights where your highlights should be on your UFO as seen here:

Step 6 – Apply a Blur to the UFO, because UFO’s are always blurry.
We definitely need to blur our space craft to look more genuine.
Zoom out to see the whole picture and press Ctrl D to Deselect.
On the menu, go to Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur.
the amount of blur depends on your image size. I used 1.7 pixels

Gaussian Blur

choose whatever looks good to you. Click OK.

Step 6 – resize and position.
If your UFO is too big, press Ctrl T and rescale using the corner handles. Press enter
to accept the size. select the Move tool (V) and position your UFO where ever it looks believable.
Duplicate your UFO layer if you want more than one UFO.

Here is my result:

Experiment with your UFO to create your own variation of an Unidentified-Flying-Object.

Thanks you for following along with this Tutorial.
Feel free to leave comments and share your finished result.

–Stay Tuned for a follow tutorial on Animating a UFO flying  in Photoshop.

Tags: adobeUFO