Once in a odd bluish/gray/greenish moon you get to run into a great new graphic plug-in that really amazes you! Well, recently I was turned on to a company called AKVIS and they seem to make some very interesting plug-ins for graphic editing and manipulation; Chameleon which instantly caught my eye had to be played with NOW!

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I ventured over to AKVIS, looked around at their toys of fun-ness. Chameleon had this bright shining glow, a vibe of “I rock and you need me”, that was screaming out for me to play with it. I downloaded a trial version and was ready to get dirty in some good old pixel editing fun.

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Here you can see the original background I decided to toy with….

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Next is the object I wanted to cleverly insert into the background above, though with Chameleon it makes it oh so easy and effortlessly!

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Here I used |SELECT -> COLOR RANGE| to get the majority of the sky.

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With the selected sky in tow my next step was very easy: I created a |HUE/SATURATION ADJUSTMENT LAYER| and de-saturated the sky

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Very similar to step 3, I used |SELECT -> COLOR RANGE| to select the mass of flowers and some of the bark in the trees

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Next I did a similar adjustment but this time for the yellow flowers. I created a |CURVES ADJUSTMENT LAYER| to boost the contrast in the flowers; so that they were ohh so very pretty!

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This shot shows the prepared background I worked with to get ready for my object

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Now here is the result of pasting my carefully selected object, Saturn, on-top of the background then |FILTER -> AKVIS -> CHAMELEON|; after chameleon does it’s magic calculations and determines the best result you are presented with a fantastic outcome!

I would like to thank Sergey Serikov for their example of Sky Swapping, which gave me my first idea. Though this is the first day with this plug-in I will be tinkering and conjuring up other works.

Ease of use, remarkable results, fast customer support, great examples and clear documentation on how to apply this plug-in to photos are some of the appreciable features AKVIS offers. I couldn’t wait to try this plugin out and within a reasonable amount of time I whipped up a quick composition. AKVIS I will sincerely have to give you the “thumbs-up”. To anyone that feels an urge to play or find a gem that’s been hiding, like it was from me, now is the time… GO GET IT!