About the Image(s)

This is an image that went through a lot of iterations, none of which involved special techniques.
I started with the landscape. It’s an often-photographed site, so I was trying for something a little different including the bush in the foreground. I tried changing colors of the flowers on the bush, emphasizing the lines of the branches, softening the bush by adding fog to the scene, various filters; none of the versions felt complete.
I added the ICM lady and used Transform=>Warp to make the hill higher. That helped, but the bush felt superfluous. So I added the man, positioned so that he was looking out from behind the bush. After struggling with wanting to lower the opacity of the man to make him fit the rest of the image without having the bush showing through, I added the cloud layer. I adjusted colors and brightness. Then I decreased the width of the image a bit to bring the main elements closer together, and used Liquify to correct minor distortions on both people.