between two lungs

i don't know what sparked it, but today i decided to go back and create some pictures in style of my older
work. this is what i got! here are the steps i took to create it:

this is the original image, stock from sxc.hu

so first i cropped the photo. i kind of liked the little town on the right hand side of the image and clouds
on the left, so to not lose that in the cropping, i selected each side of the picture individually and
transformed it. then with layer masks i just painted the edges back so they would blend. it is subtle, but i
still think it makes a difference.

with curves i continued adjusting the colours of the image until i was happy. the sun looked pretty low in
the image, but everything still had middle of the day lighting, so i thought it would look more dramatic if
i added warmness.

last but not least i added my famous birds (my own image), and moved the birds around so it looked like
 they were sweeping into the tree. i did the left had side first, then copied the layer and flipped it. with
layer masks i got rid of a few birds here and there on either side as well so it wouldn't look too identical.