Games Production

I received an email today saying that my photo submission to BigStockPhoto has been accepted! There isn't any feedback about it but I wasn't expecting any unless it was rejected.

I have submitted my final image to bigstockphoto.com and am currently waiting for it to be approved/rejected. I think it will most likely be approved because i've met all the requirements and I can't see any major problems with it.
I chose this sort of design as my final idea because after doing research on bigstockphoto, the most popular sorts of images seems to be the simple ones. In many of the searches I made on the site, the most popular were photos of a full moon, or a water droplet for example, so I decided to combine the two together into one, so technically if it was sold, the buyer could choose to crop out either aspect of the image (though unlikely).
I think the final image turned out pretty much exactly how I wanted it to, it was a good combination of the three sketches I did initially, and i'm happy with the quality of the photos. Also, I think i'm satisfied that my first two initial ideas gave me the ideas I needed for the final piece, without them it would have taken a lot longer to get an idea for what to do.

To get the lighting right, I decided I first needed to make the sea a lot darker, because at night there would be very little visible. To do this I decided to duplicate the sea layer and set the layer on top to Multiply, as this darkened the image a lot and also helped to reduce some of the brightness from the reflected clouds, as they were a bit too light before.
Although this helped to make the sea bluer and darker, it didn't really look like it was being lit from the sky by the moon. To achieve this, I found the best way was to add a new layer and use a gradient from white to a light blue, then set the layer style to Saturation.
This basically changed the shade of blue on the sea layer so that it was brightest towards the bottom of the photo and slightly darker at the top, closest to the moon.
This way, I decided to make a specific layer later for highlights, as it's easier to do if you have a single layer for each part of the image, rather than having to control shadows, highlights etc on a single one.
To create this effect I used a soft brush and painted a oval on the new layer, and set it to Overlay. Moving the layer around now was the easiest way of checking where the highlights/lighting looked best, because the luminosity would change depending on the light levels of the layers below.

Finally I decided that clouds were needed around the moon, as the area currently looked a bit blank with only the moon there. After a lot of searching I eventually found a suitable photo I had taken during a storm which had some good clouds in it. I erased the area where the sea and moon would be and was left with the following:

I distorted this image a lot, and cut and replaced several parts of it so the clouds were evenly spread, because I didn't want them covering all of the moon or stars. After I had finished with the clouds I gave them a slight blue tint to match the rest of the photo, by adding a light cooling filter.
Finally, I looked at the whole image in great detail and made a few corrections to fix some pixellation (using the blur tool) and places where the lighting looked unrealistic (by changing the light levels for the individual layers).
This is the final image I ended up with, which I think i'm pretty happy with overall. As always, it has been resized to fit the page so the original is much higher quality and resolution.

The second stage of the image was completing the top half which involved adding the moon, stars and clouds. This was a bit easier than the first stage as I already had the photos and not a lot of editing was necessary.
For the stars I used an old photo I took on a clear night with a 15 second exposure time, which I then edited to increase the light levels and make the stars more visible.

As for the moon, I took several photos through my telescope at home and got some crisp and clear photos without any cloud pollution. After looking at a selection in Photoshop I decided on one to use:

I experimented with these two images and various other layers and filters until I had them arranged how I wanted them. I decided that i'd give the whole image a "blue theme" since the water was blue anyway and the moon could be a blue moon. So I added a cooling filter and changed the light levels for the moon to make it look as if it was brighter and giving off more light. Also, I gave the stars a very slight blue tint although it's barely noticable.

Finally I started trying to get the lighting right to make it look like the sea was being illuminated by the moon.

Moving onto my final submission for the Creative Technologies module, I decided to take my favourite parts from the ideas I had had so far and combine them. This was basically:

Mock Idea 1 - Night lighting
Mock Idea 1 - Moon image
Mock Idea 2 - Turning water into an ocean effect

After this I decided to do some rough sketches of what I could do to incorporate these elements.

To begin, I started off with a photo of water that I hadn't yet used, which needed enhancing and level adjusting before I could start editing it further, as it looked very murky and undersaturated.

I thought it would be a good idea to add the clouds reflections early on so distorting the image later would be easier. I used the same photo of some clouds that I used in the previous mock idea, as they were what I needed and I don't think the conditions outside were suitable to take more photos when I wanted to do the work anyway. The clouds were added on top as a new layer and set to soft light. This effect was very useful as it cancelled out the blue sky in the background of the clouds, so the only colours were the water and the white clouds.
Also, because of effects I had applied earlier to enhance the original photo, the top of the water was too bright, so I cleared that up with the healing tool and by distorting the middle of the image with the warp tool. This is what I ended up with:

I repeated the same steps as with the previous mock idea by putting the whole image into a different perspective, using the Transform > Perspective tool.

From here I copied and pasted the image twice so I had copies on the left and right of the image. Here I used the same technique as with the mock photos. I think it worked a bit better with this photo, or it may just be that I spent more time on it. In the next screenshots you can see the Warp effect I used, and the result. The second screenshot shows the boundaries between the different layers after being warped. By this point I had about 10 layers, and I was on my fourth PSD save file.

To finish the main water section of the photo I looked over all of it and slowly corrected all the errors in my warping where waves merged into eachother and looked wrong. I also softened the top of the photo of the water to make it look more realistic, because the sea looks like it slowly fades out rather than suddenly stopping at one point. I also added a black background behind the water layer so everything else in the image at that point had a dark background to prepare for adding the moon and stars.

Moving onto Part 2.