Album art exercise and evaluation

The practise making a album cover, we was gives random links to give random text and images to give us an artist, album title and images. We then had to use these images to create an album cover and here is mine:

Here are my base images:

This image is the background, what i changed was i made the image brighter by using higher contrast and then blurred it by using the blur tool. So using the contract helped to add more colour to the dark image as the orange is now brighter and the purple is much more visible. Furthermore this contract helped to refine the larger tree more as the original was very dark making the background and tree merge slightly.

With this image i cropped the background out so i only had the object left and then used the setting to make it all black and white. Then i used the tools on the right hand bar to lower the opacity so the sunset could be seen through the object. One i done this i moved the two image over each other and made them one.

Lastly i added text using the text tool and typed in my artist (West Branch) and then the album title (The lies we tell ourselves). I then removed the present contour effect to make the text more visible and added an outer glow so the text stands out more.

I feel for a first attempt at using Photoshop in years i feel like what my vision was and the outcome where very similar and i was successful using the random images I was provided with.