Manipulated Images - Fantasy Landscapes

We were tasked to create 4 fantasy landscapes to complete the maniuplated images section of the course.  Having never used photoshop previously I found this quite a challenge, I am pleased with my final images but it took a while to get there.  I have worked through several themes and cast each one aside as I failed to produce anything even remotely satisfying!  I started off with an idea based on open doors or door-ways which would show a different landscape as you looked through the door compared to the one on 'this side' of the door.  This was really early in the course and I got frustrated with my lack of expertise with Photoshop and decided I couldn't do it so moved on ..... Another idea was to use high street scenes and replace the street with a river, woodland etc. so for example it would appear that the shops were sitting right on the edge of the river and the river would become the 'high street', I persevered with this one for a while as I really liked the idea but couldn't quite make the river look like it belonged, it was too obvious and so it was time for something else! 

Right from the beginning I have loved the effect of multiplying layers and changing the opacity to give the best effect, one of my early posts shows two examples of this and so I decided to go with this and see what I could come up with, two of my final images are below:

This is the result of combining the top two images, I did this by creating a duplicate layer of each image, then dragging one image on top of the other, multiplying the layers and adjusting the opacity to give the best effect.  I love this, you really have to look twice and i'm not sure you'd even know that was a river
if you hadn't seen the original images.

As with the first image, this is the result of combining the top two images, I did this by creating a duplicate layer of each image, then dragging one image on top of the other, multiplying the layers and adjusting the opacity to give the best effect.  This is my favourite, out of all 4 manipulated images I think this works the best, I really love the shadow of the trees against the buildings and the carpet of leaves on the road

Although I love the effect of multiplying layers I wanted to show a different technique with the next two.

Using the woodland scene from the first two images, I created a duplicate layer of each image and using the magnetic lasso I copied the right hand side of the building and pavement and pasted it into onto the woodland scene, i then used free transform to adjust the size, when that was done I copied it and used the free transform again to 'flip' the image by dragging the cursor to the centre and through to the other side.  Once happy with the positionng, I used the blur tool to soften the edges. 
I'm very pleased with the result, it's kind of surreal ..... yet not. :-)

 

                             

 

Using the woodland scene from the first two images, I created a duplicate layer of each image and using the magnetic lasso I copied the left hand side of the fence and pasted it into onto the woodland scene, using the same technques as with the previous image, I then used free transform to adjust the size, when that was done I copied it and used the free transform again to 'flip' the image by dragging the cursor to the centre and through to the other side.  Once happy with the positionng, I used the blur tool to soften the edges. 
It's not my favourite image out of the four but I think it works well



As you can see, my 'theme' is the woodland scene that I have used as a basis for each image.  I have really enjoyed this section of the course and could happily spend many hours experimenting with photoshop and creating any number of manipulated images.  Although I know that i've only scratched the surface with photoshop I feel like I have learned an awful lot and look forward to learning more.