Image manipulation Feedback - Photoshop

[debip84681538]

I'm attaching a recent composite I have made. This is more or less my first composite so I have tried to make it as realistic as possible. Here for feedback, I need someone to tell me what I've done wrong and how I can improve upon it. Also rate my composite.

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[Sahil.Chawla]

Hi Debi,

Welcome to the Adobe Community!

That is a great looking composition for a first try. I would just darken the Tortoise's shell a bit, as there is no light source in the top and the Sun is in the background.

I added some layers and used blending modes to blend them. Then I used the color lookup table to add a color tone to match up the whole composition.

Here's the final result:

Regards,
Sahil

[Trevor.Dennis]

I agree with Sahil.  You'd have made a decent job of it even if it were not your first composite.

Some of the things you have done well.  In fact I'd say really well:

You have sunk the feet into the grass hiding the base of the feet, but more importantly, you have either made a good selection of the grass, or painted grass in front of the feet.  You have also got shading pretty good at the bottom of the legs.

I 'borrow' clumps of grass from the original scene or another image.  I usually use the Quick Select tool to make the rough selection, and let Select & Mask fine tune it.  You can improve the clump by adding a layer mask and using something like a scatter brush, or even one of the Legacy grass presets byt painting with black in the layer mask.

The shading on the shadow side of the tortoise is not bad.  You have the lighter tones on the top of the head and shell, but lower down the shell has less contrast than the grass.  It's difficult to be absolute about this as the sky has some haze that would allow for that softer transition.  The bottom line here is you can allow yourself poetic license as it definitely 'looks' nicer with that soft transition that I think it would with denser shadows.

The road fits the scene well, and its perspective is excellent.  Having it follow the valley floor and disappear behind the raised ground on the left is spot on.  Were it fall down is the soft edges.

I like to study the real thing to see how things should look:

So even a thin shadow along the transition would make a difference.  Run a path along the line the shadow should follow, and stroke the path with the brush tool with size jitter set to Fade.  With the very high res image you uploaded, the fade value would need to be way up...  about 4000 or more.  Add some gaussian blur to your new shadow, but make the shadow layer a Smart Object forst so you can fine tune the blur.

Or you could make a brush: 

Start with something like a hair brush preset like this or similar.  Or just lay down some thin random lines.

Still set size jitter to Fade.

Angle jitter to max

Add some scatter jitter

And forground/background color jitter (but no hue jitter)

That would give you something like this

Add some dark brown shading behind it, and you have an instant grass edge.  You'd need to clip a curves layer to it to control brightness, but remember it is easier to make something darker than it is to make it lighter without it turning to mush.

But I'll say again, that was a remarkably good job for a first attempt.  Well done.