Making a Halo

[cliff]

I've been using PW for about a month now and I am very impressed. There doesn't seem to be much it can't do as well as or better than the other editing programs. However there may be some shortcomings. A friend sent me a photo of her baby, and I added a halo with another program and sent it back. I've been trying to duplicate this with PW, but it seems to be beyond my current abilities. Does anyone know how to do it?
Thanks very much,
Cliff

[den]

eh! eh! eh!... sometimes the doing is easier than the telling...

One possible approach...
(1) Make a copy of the original image and make subsequent changes to the 'copy image'... preserving the original image for 'reverts' and/or 'one to one' cloning corrections if needed.
(2) Click on the 'copy image' and open the Mask Tool - Oval and 'lower-left' Apply Add an oval that has the halo's OD... then 'lower-left' Apply Subtract an oval that has the halo's ID... then 'lower-left Apply a Blur to soften the halo's edges.
(3) Select the Mask Tool Paint Brush in Subtract mode and erase the halo portion that goes behind the head.
(4) Click on Mask Tool Invert.
(5) Open the Paint Tool, select an halo color, and paint the unmasked 'copy image' area.

That should about do it... for more realism, one could save the mask image and slightly displace it to create a drop shadow, adjusting the proposed shadow darkenss with the Brightness transform.

PWP has to the tools for compositing, drop shadows, etc... howbeit perhaps manually intensive but providing the needed manipulation of image data for realism...

aFlatStanley-MtBaker02-halo_400px.jpg (47.95 KiB) Viewed 4050 times

[MikeG]

Cliff,

What a nice idea!
Den beat me to the punch, but my method is a little different. Halo mask creation the same, but I chose to use the composite transform/blend with the original image as the input image and the overlay a solid color (picked from your halo), and the mask from previous step.

Making a halo is easy. Making a 'realistic' halo, that's another matter!

Mike.

[cliff]

Thanks Den and Mike,

I learned quite a bit from both your suggestions.

I'm wondering now if I could create a halo in a separate image, maybe with a white or black background, and combine it with the base image using the Composite Transform. This would enable me to rotate the halo. I'll try it when I get some time.

Thanks,
Cliff

[ksinkel]

Cliff,

You could create a 'stock' halo image and then combine it with any image you like. To do that you would also need to create an accompanying stock halo mask to separate the halo from the background. Since the mask goes with the halo image and not the base image, both would only have to be created once and could be reused for multiple base images.

When you combine the halo using two point alignment (shift, scale, rotate) would probably be sufficient to control how the halo sits on the base image.

Kiril