A Work in Progress: "Taxi"

This guide was made for entry:
"Taxi"
In Contest:
hidden elephant

step 1 of 8

This was an idea I had for this comp, I wasn't sure how it would turn out and I was debating whether to enter it as it was quite a quick fix up but I entered it anyway.
I found a great pic on sxc of Manhattan. Thanks to davidlat. I use this pic twice.

sources used for this step:

: source

step 2 of 8

I found an elephant pic I liked.
Thanks to Wia-Tirol.
I got the elephant pic in place and scaled to fit.

sources used for this step:

1: source 1

step 3 of 8

I added a layer mask to the elephant and made it a greyscale pic via image, adjustments, hue & saturation, colorize and desaturate.

step 4 of 8

I duped the elephant layer into a new document and blurred plus added contrast via curves. This is going to be my displacement map. I saved this pic as a psd file.

step 5 of 8

I duped the Manhattan pic layer and placed it above the elephant layer. I then chose filter, distort, displace and loaded my elephant psd file from step 4.

step 6 of 8

I messed about with the settings, this took a little time, I started with Horizontal and Vertical settings on 2 but ended up using a setting of 10 for each.

step 7 of 8

I reduced the opacity of my displace layer to 85% and set the blending mode to overlay.

step 8 of 8

I duped the elephant pic so I have two, one on top of the other, the bottommost layer is set to multiply, which I use for the original shadows around the feet. The mask for this layer only reveals the shadow under the feet. I would normally have used the whole shadow but its pointing the wrong way so I opt for feet only. I finally add an adjustment layer and reduce the midtones to lighten the elephant.

Final result

Pxleyes

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