Started this during the workshop using Photoshop 7 then decided to finish it in my own time at home on Photoshop CS2, which took about 3-5 extra hours including various distractions.
Took several more images from google, edited and resized the rock and smoke, then slowly added effects.
Several texture adjustments were made to the rock and smoke to make them look more realistic, and several colouring/gradient layers were drawn over the meteor and set to different blending styles, some directly duplicated to enhance saturation.
After looking at some references, I drew in some shockwaves (duplicated and edited with gaussian blur, moderate radial blur) , heat distortion (increased saturation and contrast, and a weak spherize filter) and smudged the original city layer to give the effect of a nuclear blast.
Finally, a gradient layer set to Overlay with weak opacity was added to correct the rest of the image, giving the impression of extreme heat and light. Several other effects were added to increase the realism. The final image had approximately 45 layers, and a copy of the PSD was saved in case changes ever needed to be made with access to the individual layers. For viewing purposes the image was saved as a PNG for lossless quality. This made the file size slightly larger but still only 1.43MB, as the resolution was a fairly small 1024x768. The original PSD however with all uncompressed 45 layers was 23mb.
