Compositing images example

For this post I am going to composite the air plane onto the landscape as subtly as I can. The images I am going to composite are below.

To start with I used the magic wand tool on the background. I then clicked edit then invert selection. I then needed to make sure te right parts of the plane are selected so I used the selection brush and removed certain white areas so that in when i composite it it would look normal. I then contracted the area by one pixel so that it did not have a halo around it. I then feathered it by half a pixel to further help this. I then copied and pasted it onto a new layer on the image of the landscape. I then used the select tool on the plane and reduced its size by 75% and held the shift key to constrain the proportions. I then positioned so that it looked as if it was flying. I duplicated the layer by right clicking on it then clicking duplicate layer. On the new copy i added blur by using the motion blur effect and selected the direction so it was in line with the direction it was travelling. I then erased the leading edge so that it was not blurred. I then blurred the background so that it looked like a panning shot. To further the effect i blurred the foreground once more. I like the final effect, it is pictured below.