Before and after - Naval gun 17th century

This is the photo from which I have started the ps, it is from a ship named Eastindiaman Amsterdam located in the Naval Museum of Amsterdam.
I had this idea back in November 2006 when I shot this photo, but I did not know how to do it at that time.



This is the final result.

Steps

1) Qtpfsgui - I've used a free program called qtpfsgui to create two different version of the image (one with the fattal algorithm to enhance details and textures and one with the drago algorithm to enhance colors).
2) Gimp - I've used Gimp to blend the 2 images using 2 layers, the fattal one as background and the drago one in overlay mode at 50% of opacity.
3) Gimp - I've cut off the scene in the gun's windows
4) Gimp - I've created another layer with an image of the same ship taken from the pier.
5) Gimp - I've created another layer called explosion that contain only the explosion blast effect
6) Gimp - Aligning work with the three layers ( ship in the background,explosion,and gun in the foreground)
7) Gimp - motion blur to the entire scene to simulate the gun's recoil.
8) Gimp - fancy rounded corners decoration.


That's all Folks!

Gimp and Qtpfsgui are free softwares available on Windows, Linux platforms