Well now that the elephant is out of the room, that's a pretty good picture. 😁
Thank you.
That elephant was always one of the things that bothered me about the original image - the shading seemed all wrong on it, and the image itself (besides the shading) didn't look very realistic either, like it was CGI.
Nice work Scotty! What is that little red object next to the unicyclist?
Thanks! Are you talking about the object on the floor actually next to the unicyclist's shadow? That's the majesty branding iron from WDaDU.
Also, how did you make the shadow of the unicyclist?
First, I had to cut the unicyclist out of the ADToE cover, which resulted in me having a mask. I mirrored that mask and created a new fill layer, applying that mask to it, filling it in with a flat black color, setting that layer to multiply and reduced the opacity (don't remember by how much). Then I skewed it to the correct angle. After that, I blurred the shadow a little, undid the blur but set the history brush to *after* the blur, and applied this history brush to most of the shadow. I repeated the same step multiple times, progressively adding a heavier blur each time, but only applying the history brush to progressively less of the shadow (the further away it was from the unicyclist). Finally, I used a very large, heavily feathered brush set at a reduced opacity to further reduce the darkness of the shadow (again, the further away it was from the unicyclist). Does that all make sense? Hope so! And thus concludes today's Photoshop lesson!
(Keep in mind that there may have been easier/faster/more efficient ways to achieve the effect, but that's how I did it with the limited knowledge I had, and considering that I created the image 11 years ago - I'm sure Photoshop has improved in different ways that might make accomplishing the same task easier now)