Turning a digital photo into digital art - Part 2

Now that Saga has a new lead vocalist, I find the final product for this edition of Turning A Digital Photo Into Digital Art a perfect way to celebrate!

The main component of this "artified" digital photo is a photo taken by Cabana. It was quite nicely cleaned up by Camare.


The photo was taken in Berlin and the prominent damaged building in the foreground is Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church.

The next component can also be found in Germany. It's Einstein Tower located in Potsdam, Germany.


Germany is significant with regard to Saga because that is where they have the largest fan base. That fact and the cover of their album Images At Twilight is what inspired the finished product below.

But wait! There are more components to this complex work of digital art! No art inspired by Saga is complete without one of the many variations of the Saga "bug"!

The final component is the moon.

Those of you who are fans of Saga will realize that I have used items that inspired both the Silent Knight cover and the Images At Twilight cover as components in my final product.

Without further ado, here it is:

Best viewed full size! (click image)

"How did I do it?" you ask. This one was complicated. As I recall, I worked on the Einstein Tower first. I started by adding 3 stories to it. This was accomplished by taking a very precise slice of the 2 middle stories. Then, cutting that slice in half for the third story addition. After that, I carefully masked out the top of the tower. Next, I stacked the 3 stories together taking care to align them as precisely as possible. After aligning them, I put the top back on the tower and removed any jagged edges. This was quite a challenge because the front sides of the tower aren't simply flat vertical lines. I then changed the orientation of the tower so that I could insert it into the left side of the final product. The next to last steps were changing the color of the tower and adding a lighting effect. The final step in editing the tower was masking out the background so that I could pull the tower from the image.

The other components were a bit easier to prepare. I had to mask the bug from the Images At Twilight cover and resize it as needed. I borrowed the photo of the moon from another digital photographer on the dslreports.com site. Sorry. I don't remember who so I can't give appropriate credit. I made some minor adjustments to it and changed the opacity so that the background color showed through a bit. Oh! I nearly forgot! In placing the Einstein Tower into the final product, I masked out the buildings that appear to be in front of it. Then, I put them in a separate layer so they would cover the bottom section of the tower. The final touches were changing the color of the sky using "selective color" and adding a lighting effect for the background.