I wanted to train my compositing skills with Stock Photos. After seeing a photo of an old American school bus I found inspiration to the following scenario:
Final Image
BREAKDOWN
I started with a blank 1920x1080 Photoshop project and slowly built the underwater scenario from dozens of stock photos and custom made content, for example the gradient background with liquified light rays generated from a 360° color gradient.
I started composing the bus with various light and color layers which should help to get the underwater effect. A slight motion blur was added to indicate a downward movement of the vehicle :
To get even more dynamic in the scene I decided to add air bubbles which helped me to gain the "sinking" effect. glowing effects were added to the head light of the bus to give the image a more mystique look:
There is no underwater scenario without any marine life in it, so I worked some fish, sharks and even whales in:
The next step was to give the image some depth by adding some seaground. I decided to colorcorrect and distort an image of a desert landscape.
Now I added some foreground objects to enhance the depth effect and used the liquify filter to hint some water turbulences and volume.
