why i love photoshop

i've been working for the last few days on a new home page. this one is very different; what i envisioned was rather abstract and difficult to describe, and it's turned out quite beautifully, i think.

so why do i love photoshop? because it can take an abstract mental image, and these photos, and turn it into this:



it isn't quite perfected yet, but wow - whod've thunk you could get to this from where i started?

some of the techniques i used:

masking, masking, and masking, hue/saturation, brightness/contrast, paintbrush (including one for clouds), bevel & emboss, transparency, inner glow, color overlay, gradient overlay, fuzzy paintbrush (for some of the highlights & shadows), guassian blur, diffuse glow, pen tool, blur tool, and the text tool and line tool.

i first created, colored, and masked each layer separately in photoshop (hills, each tree or set of trees, the moon) and then placed them in the master file as smart objects, so that i could apply layer effects such as guassian blur and diffuse glow non-destructively. most of the green glow on the trees is applied using inner glow on a separate layer, and the pump-jack has been recolored, and highlights/shadows added with the paintbrush tool. once the background image was created, i brought that into the home page comp as another smart object, masked the edges (using pen tool and gaussian blur), and added the navigation, lines, and text.

(please note that ALL of these images are copyrighted, and cannot be used for any reason)