Well, as you can see, the above images are original sources for the final composite of "In The Distance". I obviously looked for something of high resolution (original pics linked below) to help me with this, and although I actually do work at a lower resolution these days than what I used to (I used to go well into the 2000s of pixels, whereas I have now standardized myself to 1920x1080 (HDTV resolution) for most recent projects.

The hues of both elements were changed, but more interestingly, I had to copy over portions of the ocean to cover that annoying rock to the side... Might have been nice to keep, but I didn't want it there originally. The sky was corrected a bit more to match the ocean (rather than vice versa), and the quick mask tool was used to extract myself. I've fallen in love with that tool lately as it gives me nice, clean, natural extractions from my images... Which by the way, was a crappy ISO 200 image (lots of noise on my poor camera unfortunately). I blended both images together via a gradient layer mask, and applied a black "aura" to the horizon to cheapen the effect. It worked...

The moon/planet in the background was created with the help of a Photoshop magazine I found in Borders earlier that day, but the entire layer was actually set to soft light for the blending mode to hide it behind clouds (I did NOT want to selectively cut it behind the clouds).

Finally, an adjustment layer (color balance) was added to the entire thing (but not before obviously matching up each layer's individual color balance), with some higher red highlights and deeper cyan/green shadows and midtones. I was really impressed by how it came out on my face, but the uneven lighting of my body leaves something to be desired... The very last thing I did was duplicate the entire image into a very top layer, gaussian blur it, and soft light it over the entire image (Bloom filter!).