In this tutorial you will learn how to make a fantasy photomanipulation and how to combine stock photos and photoshop effects to add realism to your work. We will use a few wing stock images to create a nice portrait effect.
Final result preview
- Tutorial type: Step by step text tutorial
- Number of steps: 13
- Stock images available for download: yes
- PDF version available: yes
- Video version available: no
- Original PSD available: yes
Step 1–Preparing the model
Frist thing we need to do is to open our model into the canvas, next we need to Desaturate the stock by going to image>adjustment>desaturate, now we need to bring some contrast to our model by creating two layers: one with blend mode to Overlay and one with blend mode to Normal. Make sure the background layer is black.
Now in the Overlay layer, select the brush tool by pressing B on your keyboard, and select a soft brush with low opacity and start brushing the dark areas of the face. Next select the Normal layer and darken the area around the hair with a big soft brush.
Finally we need to expand our image from the top, to do that select the crop tool by pressing C on your keyboard, next select the whole image and drag the selection upwards then press Enter.
Now we need to fill the empty space, to do so create a new layer under the models layer and fill it with black by selecting the paint bucket tool (G on keyboard) and to conclude this step select the model layer and add a layer mask by clicking on the square icon next to the fx icon on the bottom of the layer palette.
Now select the layer mask and the gradient tool which is located on the same group as the paint bucket tool, then click on the top of the image and drag up, this will hide the top border of the image so that we won’t see its hard edge anymore. This last task was just to explore some photoshop features, but you can do it the easy way by selecting the eraser tool (E) and by holding shift click and drag on the image.
Step 2 –Adding the feathers to the hair
On this step we will import our Emu feather texture to our image. Now we need to position our texture so it will go on the same direction of the model’s hair, to do it press CTRL+T to bring the free transform tool then rotate the texture as desired and hide the undesired parts by creating a layer mask. Duplicate the layer (Right click>duplicate) and repeat this step to the rest of the hair.
Here ends the preview