But finding the right elephant image turned out to be a tall order. I just couldn't find a source image of an elephant that matched both the perspective and the lighting of the street scene.

I did, however, find an elephant image that nicely fit the scene's perspective. One problem -- it didn't remotely match the scene's lighting.

But rather than throw the image out, I decided to try to alter the elephant's lighting to make it match.

Prepping the Elephant

But first things first, I masked away everything but the elephant...

And then I performed a little cosmetic surgery on the big guy, adding some tusks and rearranging his feet and trunk for dramatic effect.

Looking good, but now to match the lighting.


Shadow and Highlight

To create the simulated lighting for this scene, I resorted to a fairly simple trick. Looking at the street scene, I can see that every object has both areas of intense highlight and deep shadow. To recreate this lighting with my elephant, I'm going to need to create two separate elephants, one lit for bright sunlight, and one lit for deep shadow -- and then combine the two images.

To accomplish this task, I needed two identical elephant layers, so I duped another layer of the elephant. I named the bottom layer Highlight Elephant and named the top layer Shadow Elephant.

Creating the Highlight Layer

Selecting the Highlight Elephant Layer, I began to brighten up this layer to match the golden highlight values of the elephant in direct sunlight. There are a variety of adjustment techniques that I could have used to brighten and colorize the image -- Levels, Curves, Brightness, Contrast, Color Balance, Hue, Saturation -- but in this case I used the following adjustments:

Brightness : +30
Contrast : +30
Color Balance: Red: +10
Color Balance: Yellow : -50

Mind you, these are approximate tweaks, but your goal is a brightened golden elephant that now represents the elephant illuminated by direct sunlight. Admittedly, it looks pretty awful, but hang in there.

Creating the Shadow Layer

Next I next turned on the Shadow Elephant Layer. Again, using a process of trial and error, I adjusted the elephant to match the shadowed area of the image.

It should be noted that shadows aren't just darker, but they are quite desaturated and with less contrast. The following adjustments got me close to where I wanted to be:

Brightness : -80
Contrast : -50
Saturation : -80
Hue : +165

Now for the tricky part -- blending the two layers.