FINAL PROJECT

So there were some issues, obviously.  Working with this many effects turned out to be pretty ambitious of my abilities in Photoshop.

The picture that I had selected was much fuzzier in terms of focus than I had anticipated.  I could have shot at a higher ISO than I did, but I didn't want the image to be very grainy so I opted for the ISO 800 with a slightly lower shutter speed.  At the end of the day, that may have made the image I had to work with for background in better focus, but I digress.

My only issue with the ice hand was the fact that I just couldn't get any sort of steam going in a way that looked convincing.  I tried a few different methods, but at the end it just looked better without it.  The fire effect was a bit more stylized-looking than I had intended as a final product, but overall I'm happy with it.

The standing roommate is where my biggest issue was, obviously.  Of all of them, his features were the most blurred, so I actually needed to downgrade the image quality of the texture I mapped onto his skin so that it would at least look somewhat natural.

The bubble in the background, while it wasn't done the way I had gotten through the tutorial, was something I'm particularly pretty proud of.  In the tutorial it was rather straightforward since the bubble was the only thing in the image, so the illusion could be sold with a simple ellipse.  However in my case I had objects in the foreground to worry about.  As it turned out, a simple layer adjustment and lens flare mixed with some creative use of the eraser tool and an addition of a lens flare for the final product, while perhaps not quite as convincing as the tutorial laid out, did make a somewhat convincing illusion.