Advice/Help?

I am trying to recreate what something would look like in the 13th Century.

The original image is: http://i27.tinypic.com/ut15v.jpg
The transparency I wish to use is: http://i25.tinypic.com/25gs38o.jpg

What I am trying to create is something that looks like this: http://tinypic.com/r/2ymzugy/3

-(This is what the castle you altered would have looked like in 13th century, it would have been in marshy area on a slight raised ground with a kind of wall structure round it and/or small possible moat)-


I have tried these mocks but it just does not look right. Any suggestions or demos that you could suggest. My brain has gone dead and me and photoshop/gimp is useless.

http://tinypic.com/r/nfr2fd/3
http://tinypic.com/r/2nm41ts/3
http://tinypic.com/r/288webl/3
http://tinypic.com/r/fk2mwp/3
http://tinypic.com/r/51ufyt/3

Well the issues your seeing are mostly due to the fact that you aren't matching the color, size and perspective of your landscape when you drop the castle image into the landscape.

I recommend looking for tutorials about composting, matte painting, color correcting, etc.

You will probably find that many of these PSDTuts+ tutorials cover parts of what you want to do. But I should warn you that good photo manipulation is an art and as such takes time and practice to get it right.

Like graphixboy said, it's just not that easy to blend two photos together. Perspective, shadows, light, highlights, you name it. There's a lot of elements to making them fit seamlessly. You may be better off to sketch and paint it from scratch.