My girlfriend requested a wallpaper that included her dog, so I thought I would share it on the site as well. Here’s a way to keep your pet within clicking distance on your desktop.
Use Photoshop to add Your Dog to Your Desktop
1. Open a good picture of your K9 buddy in photoshop. High quality pictures with his/her eyes looking into the camera work best.
2. Now use the magnetic lasso tool to outline your dog, as to separate them from the background.
3. Once the selection has been highlighted with the lasso tool, right-click on the selection and choose “layer via copy” to put the selection on its own layer.
4. Now open a new window with the dimensions you choose for your wallpaper. I choose 1440 x 900 for mine. Choose two shades of a color one for the foreground and one for the background and use the gradient tool to drag diagonally across the new window to create a gradient effect.
5. With the layer of your cut-out pet in the other window selected, drag the cut-out onto the new gradient window you just created with the move tool.
6. Once moved over, resize the image of your pet by hitting “control T” or alternatively Edit>Free Transform.
7. Again with the magnetic lasso tool, on the image of the pet that you just dragged over and resized, trace out the head only and right-click to add it to its own layer.
8. With this new layer selected, slightly enlarge the head with “control T” and then move it back over the body to cover the smaller head behind it. The keyboard arrows will give you fine tuned control in this part.
12. Now, with the layer containing the cut-out head still selected choose Filter>Liquify from the top menu in Photoshop. Use the liquify brush to slightly enlarge the eyes, nose and ears of your dog. The brush size should be a tad bit bigger than the actual eyes. You can also drag a slight smile on the mouth your dog too. Click OK when satisfied with the results. By enlarging some of the main features, the dog begins to pop out of the screen more, and looks less like he was just copy and pasted.
13. Last step. Highlight the body layer of your dog and select the Blur tool. With a Blur brush slightly larger than the dogs body, swoop over the body to give it a slight out of focus look. Make sure the head layer is not selected.
All you have to do now is save your project as a .jpg file and apply it as a wallpaper on your desktop. I hope this helps someone.
Final Result
