original unadjusted images


final image histogram

both original images were adjusted with the auto corrections tools.  actually the turtle required little correction.  the cityscape required a lot.  fade correction was used in addition to auto corrections on that one.

cityscape resized to better fit the turtleshell and have more buildings in it. i still didn't feel i had enough buildings in the original to properly fit what i wanted to do, so i made selections from the skyline, copied and pasted as new layers.  they were then positioned and merged, they were cleaned up with eraser and clone tools.

geometric effects were then applied to the cityscape to give it more of the curve of the turtle shell.  circle, horizontal cylinder (50%) and vertical cylinder (60%) were used.

opacity of cityscape layer was lowered so the shell could be clearly seen.  a mask was painted onto areas outside of the turtle shell, saved to disc  (thank goodness, 'cause i crashed in the middle of my first attempt...with no other saves but the painted mask.)  and merged with the cityscape layer. the layer was then returned to 100% opacity.

edges of the shell selection were then blurred a bit with the retouch tool, soften. cityscape  (which had been on top) was moved under the turtle layer. eraser was used to remove any oversoftening that went outside the shell. (shoulda used the soften brush on the edge of my coffee cup last week...ha ha.)

a blend mode of multiply was applied to the turtle layer.

manual color correction of gray #11 was applied to the cityscape layer. that layer was then sharpened and sharpened more to make it more visible through the pattern of the shell.

layers were then merged. histogram adjustments were made and then it was resized and unsharp mask applied. saved at a jpg compression of 23.

p.s. i thought about slightly blurring the background here as well, but decided i liked this image better with the bg *as is* so that you have to sort of look twice to see what's happened to the poor old turtle.