This challenge was left W I D E open...loved it
. Here be my submission.
The composite image consists of basically 5 layers with a few adjustment layers on top of that. All of the individual images were yanked off of google image search. From the bottom up:
Base layer: A greenish creek bed cropped to fit...uhh thats it
.
Fish: Extracted him from an image with my trusty extraction weapon of choice, the pen tool. His angle was a touch off so I used the liquify tool . He also has a brightness/contrast adjustment layer and opacity tweak. The last touch, the bubbles, a cool brush-set courtesy of Adobe Action Xchange:
http://xchange.studio.adobe.com/axAs...sortorder1%3Dd
Water: Started out with a tutorial from http://www.spoono.com/tutorials/photoshop/water/ . The original was a little too turbulent for my needs so I modified it it. Instead of running radial blur on the clouds layer I ran a motion blur. This didn't give the contrast for a proper "wave" effect. So I hand painted some black and white wavy bits and stylized with bas relief and chrome. I then added a wave and zig zag distort to my liking. I finally adjusted w/ Hue/Saturation to get my coloring.
Eagle reflection: One of the wings was definitely not going to work. So I erased it, copied the other wing to another layer flipped it and nudged it into place and merged. When I'd placed him I adjusted his brightness, contrast and opacity to achieve a reflection.
At this point I ran adisplacement map on both the fish and the bird. I made a copy of my water layer, greyscaled it and saved it as a seperate file, displace.psd. I ran filter>distort>displace w/the default settings once on each animal. Heres a link to a wicked diplacememt tut:
http://www.polykarbon.com/tutorials/...splacement.htm
Talons: made a copy and did a light gaussion blur and stylized w/ wind twice...trying to give a sense of movement. I ran a hue/sat adjustment layer to get the orange huer and then hand painted the mask to bring the talons back.
There were a few final tweaks that I did but unfortunatly lost my first description so this one is by memory.
Cheers,
Etienne

The composite image consists of basically 5 layers with a few adjustment layers on top of that. All of the individual images were yanked off of google image search. From the bottom up:
Base layer: A greenish creek bed cropped to fit...uhh thats it

Fish: Extracted him from an image with my trusty extraction weapon of choice, the pen tool. His angle was a touch off so I used the liquify tool . He also has a brightness/contrast adjustment layer and opacity tweak. The last touch, the bubbles, a cool brush-set courtesy of Adobe Action Xchange:
http://xchange.studio.adobe.com/axAs...sortorder1%3Dd
Water: Started out with a tutorial from http://www.spoono.com/tutorials/photoshop/water/ . The original was a little too turbulent for my needs so I modified it it. Instead of running radial blur on the clouds layer I ran a motion blur. This didn't give the contrast for a proper "wave" effect. So I hand painted some black and white wavy bits and stylized with bas relief and chrome. I then added a wave and zig zag distort to my liking. I finally adjusted w/ Hue/Saturation to get my coloring.
Eagle reflection: One of the wings was definitely not going to work. So I erased it, copied the other wing to another layer flipped it and nudged it into place and merged. When I'd placed him I adjusted his brightness, contrast and opacity to achieve a reflection.
At this point I ran adisplacement map on both the fish and the bird. I made a copy of my water layer, greyscaled it and saved it as a seperate file, displace.psd. I ran filter>distort>displace w/the default settings once on each animal. Heres a link to a wicked diplacememt tut:
http://www.polykarbon.com/tutorials/...splacement.htm
Talons: made a copy and did a light gaussion blur and stylized w/ wind twice...trying to give a sense of movement. I ran a hue/sat adjustment layer to get the orange huer and then hand painted the mask to bring the talons back.
There were a few final tweaks that I did but unfortunatly lost my first description so this one is by memory.
Cheers,
Etienne
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