One thing I always find interesting is looking at just what elements go into photocompositons. In this case, the tight framing means there's not too great a number of source images:
1. The ground (heh) image is "Milky Way" by John Fowler. This didn't need too much manipulation, just scaling and finding a good section of the starfield (actually, basically what's covered by the moon in the collage), but since that's relatively boring I didn't bother including a standalone version in the gallery -- just go to Commons to see it. To make everything stand out, I did make a burn layer out of a duplicate of the contents; every other colour fix was a flat colour with the (very) occasional alpha channel.
2. Said moon is "Full Moon" from NASA, which is actually generated rather than being a photo -- which makes it by far the sharpest thing in the image and is the main reason everything else looks so bad. If I wasn't scaling down so far I'd probably give it a bit of blur, but as is that's unnecessary work. The shadowing winds up mostly hidden in the final composite, but is just a very strong linear burn layer (it's not particularly accurate lighting, but I liked the effect around the lower crater as giving a good enough approximation of height) with a linear gradient layer mask. Once it's stacked in, it's given a lavender tint via a hard light layer to unify it with the starmap.
3. The owl is "Barn owl with tea" by Edd Deane. Obviously I had to get rid of the rat or whatever rodent that is, but while their posture wasn't exactly what I was looking for, they had the dual benefits of being clearly in flight (one of the other choices I was looking at was striking/landing, and while it's not obvious it's enough that your mind tells you something's off) and very obligingly holding their foot mostly clear of their body. Most of the cleanup was exactly that -- getting rid of a couple odd lines, copying the visible tail feather to replace the one obscured, etc. -- but the tinting actually required a few passes with different colours and merge algorithms since the first one (a light blue burn to bring the shadows out) had the side effect of making the rusty brown back of their head stand out too strongly; the solo version here is after that burn but before any desaturation and further colour-toning.
4. The scroll is "MOO - Schriftrolllen" (or untitled, I'm not sure) by Wolfgang Sauber. It initially didn't seem to need much work, until I realized that the rightmost roundel and the hanging strap were both cut off; the former was copied over from the one from the lower scroll in the source, and I don't remember exactly where in the image I got the base pattern for the latter, but there was definitely a bit of custom painting to make it look cohesive. Funnily enough, the shadowing uses a dark violet layer with a soft light merge algorithm.
5. Finally, to justify my nattering on about colours and merge layers, I've also included the composite minus all of its manipulation layers (and without the random-noise clouds I added to tie the moon into the sky). Maybe not terrible if it's scaled down enough, but it's dull and feels very flat compared to the final.
