Nuclear Blast

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Overview: This image is inspired by a poster for a game called Fallout 4. The intention of this image was to both create a composite to practice color matching and to learn how to use the light effect rendering filter. It took an estimated twenty minutes to complete as it was a fairly simple project.

Process: The image is a simple composite of two images, the blast and the city. Both assets were found on free to use stock sites. First I masked the mushroom cloud so that it no longer had its original background. It was then placed on the city image and duplicated. The duplicate was then changed to a lighten blending mode and the opacity was brought down so that it was a little less harsh. Next, a mixing brush was used on the bottom of the blast so that it mixed with the city features below it. With the shape of the cloud done the next step was to add the light. Using filter>render>lighting effects.Using a pin light focused on the blast it added the spreading light effect that I was aiming for. Because the light source was a sort of fiery explosion I also added an orange tint to the light. Finally, to make the images blend together I merged them and added a final camera raw filter. In the camera raw settings I lowered the exposure, added orange split toning, and finally I added a slight vignette centered on the explosion. Adding a single filter to all the components of the picture made it so that their colors all appeared to be captured by the same camera. Darkening the image also made the blast stand out making the world darker in comparison to the blast, much like I would imagine it might do in real life.

For the future: Were I to do a similar themed image, I would likely make three changes. First, I would try and find a higher resolution blast. Since the city was much more detailed than the blast I had to shrink the blast layer and blend it farther back so that it did not appear pixelated. This resulted in the second change I would make, the alignment of the light and shadows. If you look at the ground near the man watching the city, you see they are angled slightly too far left to align with the explosion. However, I could not move the mushroom cloud closer without the aforementioned pixelation. It still semi-lines up so I am not too disappointed. Finally, I would add a sort of shock wave-cloud effect on the ground around the cloud. An explosion of that magnitude would likely send air, dust, and debris flying in all directions and I feel that I missed a chance for realism by neglecting to add that effect. It would likely be a simple matter of rendering clouds, changing their opacity, and masking the layer to appear intermingled with the buildings. I think overall the image is a fair product and compares well with some of the images and posters that I based it off of.

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