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.
