On Producing my Stained Glass ICM

I've had some questions lately about the process used to capture and create the recent ICM work I produced of the stained glass, so I decided to share with the group.

The base image I used was a slow pan that just slightly blurred the edges between the colors while retaining the rectangular shapes. This is what might look like a horizontal pan in the final image. The second and third images were of two separate portions of the glass. The second had most of the yellows and greens, while the third had mainly blues and oranges.

I layered these images together using ON1 Photo Raw. The first image at the bottom of the stack was at 100% opacity. The other two were at 30% each. I spent significant time in HSL on each image tweaking all three to make the "perfect" balance. Changing one on one color affected the overall look of the image significantly. While I was going for a pastel look when I first edited, I don't think the final image really ended that way.

The result after exporting was very similar to the one you see now. I did the final tweaking on Luminar AI. I brought in a little more definition to the lines between panes first. Then I brought the saturation down and the vibrance up to go for the more muted look above. After that I was basically done.

Images in order are
1) Image one described above
2) Image two described above
3) Image three described above
4) Initial export from ON1
5) Final version