Christmas photo

What is the best process to follow for placing a "santas' hat" on a dog. The dog is already selected and pasted on a new background. Alls left is to put a nice big hat on her head, and the finished product looking great of course.

Thanks a million
Ryan

I would say all you need to do is put a santa hat on it. What will make the difference between a dog wearing a hat and a picture of a dog with a hat pasted on it, is the shadows. Just get a picture of a santa hat on there, and then use the color burn tool or something to make shadows. You can look at another photo to try and get the shadows right. If you need help, someone here would probably be willing to help out.

Ok , imagine you have a dog , a hat , and a background. Each of those elements has a 1) color 2)form ( such as size / perspective / etc) and 3) shadow/light . The best way to do it right is to match all of those things I listed above.For the 1) try to adjust colors on the hat and the dog to the same tone and intensity . Use color balance , Hue saturation and curves to do it . 2) Form , well form can be achieved by choosing a proper photograph or by transforming and resizing (you might want to observe how your dog , if you have 1 , looks with the hat on , not just santaclaus hat , but 1 that looks similar) . 3) this is the most hard thing to do , to match shadows and lights of the dog and hat . As Deker said you can try dodge and burn too to intensify the shadows/lights to match the tone .
PS . You can exadurate your composition by making hat
huge and poor puppy strugling to keep himself from falling
nothing is wrong with disproportion , but light/shadow , and color match have to be present.