Here’s a visual demonstration of how I did it!

I then took a bunch of butterfly pictures under the same lighting conditions, with the same background, like so:

I then took both the static and moving butterflies from that stock set and added them to create this:


My next task was to create the “atmosphere” so I took the most vibrant of my stock sky images and added them on a separate layer using the “softlight” blend mode (PSCS3). Then I added a motion blurr to create ‘streaks of light’ (filter>blur>motion blur).

Using the same technique I added a texture from Les Brumes, a user on Flickr, like so:

Finally, after tweaking it a bit using the ever famous dodge & burn technique, I ended up with this