Night Patrol... A Breakdown Of The Artwork

Hey all! I've been working on a new image, trying to get my night time shots looking up to snuff.... Not that easy when dealing with digital lighting, lots of trial and error. I decided for a bluish tint to help with the nighttime perspective, as well as backlighting, flashlight effect and a few other tricks. I think the image came out okay, let me know what you all think. Here is the finished image, and a little breakdown of the work. I put a larger one at bottom of post so you can get a closer look. Enjoy...

The first step is to create the scene. I used DAZ Studio, and DAZ3D assets. Ruined buildings, car ruin, M3 figure, Mos Invasion outfit, and my desert paint for the outfit.

Once that was done and placed where I wanted, I had to create a camera angle for cinematic effect, and light the scene with backlighting, flashlight glare, turn down the atmosphere considerably, and use several blue tinted spotlights to give it the old night feel.

After several trial renders I got these two, which I then took into Pixelmator, My photo editor, and combined them, setting each as a layer, the dark one over the lighter one, then erased the dark away in places I wanted to show more.

I then went to Pixabay and got the image I would need for the sky.

From here, I used several photoshop brushes that are compatible with my editor, creating mist, rain, rain drops, back drop destroyed buildings, flashlight effect, a few twigs, grass, and rain runoff on the houses. Each addition needs to be a new layer. if you paint directly on the image, you cannot rotate, move, or reshape your brush to fit the image where you want it. Layers... I love and hate layers. They are needed, but if you forget to create a new one with each addition, you can run into issues quick.

After about 9 hours.... mostly cause I'm picky and use a lot of trial and error to get those happy accidents that work... I got what I was looking for and then combined my layers and fooled with the color options until I got the mood I wanted. And that's it! Hope you like the image, would really like some feedback. And as promised, here is a bigger version to look at. Thanks for looking and have a great day!