I meant the way the water (thats what it looks like) overlays the turtle and still looks like it's apart of the actual picture
soft edges, blending, and smudging. I took the image, duplicated it, did a guassian blur at about 55x, the colored it blue (so it really just looked like a blurry, blue copy of the image. I then overlayed it on the stock, deleted over the turtle with a soft edged brush, and smudged it back so it looks like it's seemless and discolors the turtle a tad bit, as if it was really under water. I then used splatter brushes to give it some detail and zazz. A nebula stock gave the water some texture and a star stock added some flare.
took the blur tool to add some depth. Real photos have depth, obviously as things are closer and farther than others. It's adds more "real life".