the grass is greener final product

This here is the finished image of the grass is greener. I have made a few changes from the previous blogged image most notibaly the children specifically the girl. If you noticed i have completly changed the image of the young girl as i felt the one i had in there didnt fit with my idea as she looked far to happy and bright which was not what i wanted her to portray. I've also changed the colour aswell before i had each element colourised differently but realised it would look much better and consistant if i added all the parts in a colourised it all at once the same colour. so i restarted which wasnt too bad as i had all the ethched images saved so it was just a matter of replacing and sizing. Overall im reasonably happy with how the image turned out despite my initial concerns. I still fell like i wasnt able to bring to life the image as it was in my head but i realise i am still learning and it wont be perfect at first and that i just have to keep working hard putting in the effort and eventually it will pay off. A big problem i had with this piece was finding the images i wanted. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to find a full body image of a man or children standing facing forward! i searched google and sxc among other sites with very little luck! the images i found and eventually used are pretty close to what i had in mind so it worked out but i do realise the image of the girl is slightly out of focus compared to the rest of the images but she was the best one i could find so i chose to make that comprise because i felt it better to get the message across as i wanted and have the image slightly lower quality than to have a high quality image that didnt fit with my message. The city background image was also not quite what i had in mind but again it was the best image i could find that fitted what i wanted, plus it had the billboard so i altered my idea a little to fit the image and i think it turned out pretty well. Adding the shadows on this one was reasonably easy since there was no real way to tell what way the light was coming from so i got to choose so i chose it to be coming from behind which meant the shadows would be in front of the bodies. To do the shadows i copied the image, rotated it upside down, flipped it horozontally, lowered the lightness to nil, added a gausian blur then changed the opacity. I also added a drop shadow to the images on the bill board to make them look better and stand out against the board a bit more.