Nest Stage in painting process

I have had a couple of requests for more info about my painting process so here is the second installment.

In recent years I have been painting from photos so let's go with that.  First I take a lot of pictures with my little Canon Elf.  The latest group that I am working on were taken from the car window as I rode around Philadelphia because we were caught in a traffic jam on the river drive.  I took the pictures when we stopped for a light or stop sign, somewhat at random.

The first shot is one of these.  I think I was aiming at the shadows on the wall but got the bonus of the boy with trash.

I downloaded the photo into my computer and opened it in Photoshop.   The first thing I wanted to do was straighten out the buildings.  I used "filter" and then "distort" for this.  Next I moved in and eliminated some of the building and moved the boy forward in a complicated combination of "copy, cut, paste, erase and move" for the boy and then "copy and image size ( in edit )" for the background of the boy.

Why did I want to move him forward?  Not sure, just did.  It was something about the combination of shapes and the way he was heading into the blue green area.  Then I wanted a little more atmosphere so I adjusted the light situation with "Filter, Render, Light Affects, omni."  This was a little too light on the right but I knew I could adjust that when painting and I liked the feeling.  However it was much too much information for the 9" x 12" canvas I had ready to go.  It should be a larger painting.  Tomorrow next version.