filtered background photos

[Free Time Machine]

My game has to be finished within the next four days or it won't count as an anniversary present! If only I had the time, I would lovingly hand-craft every single bg in the game. But since this is not the case, they might as well all be filtered photos (for the sake of uniformity).

Now, advice, please: I use Photoshop. What's a good filtering method to get consistently decent quality bgs? I'd like everything to kind of visually... go together, if that's at all possible. If it helps, here's the first finished sprite (unless you count still having wince-worthy errors as unfinished).

[DaFool]

Looking nice.

It is a fairly detailed but soft sprite style, so perhaps you can take a look at Starlit Sky and try to copy the filtering system there... I think it was similar to Higurashi style... a series of Gaussian Blurs and trace outlines perhaps? I forget off the top of my head.

But then again, unfiltered BGs might work as well.

[rocket]

Have you tried Filters>Artisitc Effetcs?

Paint Daubs and Smudge Stick are pretty good for paint-ifying photos.

[uluuu]

Usually a mix of softglow (glow radius in the negatives somewhere) and gaussian blurs works for me. Then again, I haven't finished a game yet so I'm not sure if it looks good to anyone other than myself.