Editing Friday; Penguin/Cat

If i was a scientist i am sure i would be either working in astrophysics or genetic engineering  Why these two? Because i feel deep down that I would be a super hero villain.

The Penguin Cat idea came from reading Andrews post yesterday “Oh you Fickle People“. In the post Andrew comments that the Arctic sells and the first day he stops posting pictures of penguins his readership plummets.

I later commented that maybe penguins are like cats on the internet. If you post a picture of a at your site will get a huge number of hits. It is something about cats.
I mentioned in a another post not that long ago that, if the future children of earth used the internet as a source of how our lives were lived they would come to the conclusion that we worshiped cats. Quite similar to the way we think Egyptians worshiped cats and dung beetles.

I went to work and on the cold tram ride I stated thinking about having a penguin and a cat together in an image. Would this make the internet crash, I wondered. Well I have made a Toucan Tiger before.Although not that good as it was done as a demonstration of different techniques.

The first thing I had to do was source some images of cats and penguins. It is not simply finding any cat and penguin, you need to look at the body and pose of the animal. I was also looking at the fur of the cats as well to see which patterns would fit best with the penguins. I found loads of cats and penguins quite easily. I had a few options but i settled for a young kitten and a young penguin to make the image extra cute.

Once I had got my images, I layered the images in Photoshop. I placed the Kitten on top and resized the image so the head of the cat matched the size of the penguins head.

I began by masking the head into the body of the penguin. Once blended I looked at the body of the penguin and using the selection tool I selected the breast of the bird. I  went to my cat layer copied the same area and pasted into a new layer and then began blending again.

I used the same technique for creating the breast to create the sides. All the time masking the new details into the penguin  I do it like this because it is easier to add something than remove something. I used a large low opacity brush about 10%  I slowly built up the details.

Once blended I grouped the cat layers and did some final blending. I also added a photo filter to cool down the cat and make its tones match the penguin image. I added in a slight curves adjustment.

Finally i sharpened the new image using the high pass method. I then masked this out so that it was only the cats face that was sharp.

Here is my Penguin Cat, or as i now will name it Caguin. The compost was quite straight forward but took time just to make sure the image was blended well. Both the original images had a melancholic look to them which, I think made the composite work better for the final image.

Will it crash the internet? Well we will just have to see.

Let me know your opinion on the image. Do you think it could crash the internet? All these and more comments are welcome int he comment box below.

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