Sailing Under the Dome

[Judy Howle]

This is an image of a kite that I made around sunset years ago. I did a lot of color and tone enhancing with Ps CC, Topaz Adjust and Nik Color Efex, then I used Pixel Bender Spherize in CS5, selected the sphere and put it on a layer and used layer styles to make it look dome-ish.

[Paul Lagasi]

Looks like a crystal ball with a ship in it, very nice results. Nice work

[Judy Howle]

Thanks Paul!

[Nancy Bell]

Fun! I really like how the clouds drift into the circle. I am so glad you said the "ship" was a kite or else I never would have guessed. Those wonderful flying tails should have given me a big clue, but I rarely think of kites.

[Judy Howle]

Thanks Nancy! I like the tails too.

[Diane Miller]

Very intriguing, but I wish the tail didn't come quite so close to the edge of the sphere. Rescale or move that layer a little?

[Judy Howle]

Thanks Diane. If I made the sphere any smaller the ship would be too close to that edge. I tried all kinds of settings to make it better and none worked well. I actually cloned out some of the tail that went past the edge.

[Mitch Carucci]

This image just works. Very subtle graphic design, but very pleasing all round. (For me, the tail looks just right.)

[Diane Miller]

I assumed the "ship" was on its own layer. Sounds like it belongs to the cloud layer.

If you have extra sky that you had cropped, on the left and bottom, it might work to go to a larger canvas and move the sphere, but you probably thought of that. (It would work off-center as well.) Esthetically, it would also work to have the tail extending past the edge of the sphere, as long as it was far enough to look intentional.

Lots of choices in an image like this!

[Cheryl Slechta]

Great thinking, Judy. For some reason it reminds me of the movie, Peter Pan.

[Judy Howle]

I assumed the "ship" was on its own layer. Sounds like it belongs to the cloud layer.

If you have extra sky that you had cropped, on the left and bottom, it might work to go to a larger canvas and move the sphere, but you probably thought of that. (It would work off-center as well.) Esthetically, it would also work to have the tail extending past the edge of the sphere, as long as it was far enough to look intentional.

Lots of choices in an image like this!

Yes the ship was on the base image with clouds. It was so wide with the tail it took up over half the width. I used Spherize on the base image so the sphere was not separate. I just selected it with the circle marquis and put it on a layer to add glow and shadow to it. I should have left more sky above and below, well all around actually, as you suggested and then could have done the sphere differently but I did a lot of cloud cloning and moving before I got the sphere idea so I probably won't be doing a makeover.