BUILDING A SIMPLE SCENE USING MAYA AND PHOTOSHOP – PART 2 OF 2

I started compositing in Photoshop using four images.  One image was an aerial photograph that I picked up off of Shutterstock.  The other three had the aircraft as well as contrail guides.

I applied a hue/saturation adjustment to the aircraft as well as a photo filter adjustment.  My intention was to color cast the aircraft with a little blue so that they would merge better into the scene.  I also feathered the edges of the aircraft and used the erase tool along those edges to merge the aircraft into the background.  The further aircraft (B-17s) were decontrasted and brightened a little to merge them better into the background (atmospheric perspective).

To create a sense of movement with the P-51s I added wingtip vortices.  For the B-17s I added contrails which matched my guide layer.  I created a contrail image which is 20k pixels in size.  I placed this image into my composite image and simply scaled, rotated, and moved into place.

I finished off the image by adding muzzle flashes and bullet trails to the foreground  P-51.  I also added two lens flares and painted by hand the pilot in the foreground P-51.

By the time the composite was done I had built about 35 layers.

Here is the final image again.