"Home is Wherever I Am" Cover Illustration

This is a cover illustration for a story about a young scientist finding her "home" after bouncing between Los Angeles and New York City and back: https://www.thexylom.com/post/home-is-wherever-i-am

Immediately I thought of a photo illustration that would involve the skylines of both cities that pays homage to both locations that she has called home, which would involve two photos taken at a roughly similar angle under roughly similar lighting. In fact, this was a scrapped idea for another story, but that contributor lived in a small college town so no such photos were available for me to tinker on. The two best photos I could find were uploaded on Unsplash. However, the LA photo was still considerably brighter than that of NYC.

Using Canva, a freemium software, I placed the two photos side by side and adjusted the hues. To cover up the cloud layers on top of LA's skyline, I turned the contrast all the way up. With a sleight of hand, I cropped the photos where there were each a building of similar architecture, so it appears that the skyline is continuous. This also required a significant rescaling of the LA skyline photo.

The first version I created was in a red hue. This didn't work out, as it looked rather menacing to the scientists, and it appeared to come straight out from a zombie movie in my opinion! We then tried various shades of blue, at her request. It turned out to be much harder to adjust; the blue one that came out was too dark (4th), which prevented any detail of the Brooklyn side of NYC and that of the Hudson River. Eventually, we settled on a lighter cyan background, which worked out perfectly for everybody involved! The trickiest part was to smooth out the border of the two photos without significantly altering the brightness of the LA skyline, and making sure that for the composite building where the two photos meet, the lighting looks reasonable to the naked eye. Can you find where one photo ends and the other starts?