Photo Manipulation Creative Block

in this video I'm going to show you how to create a surreal portrait effect like this we're going to be combining a portrait along with all eight of these different pictures of wooden blocks and we've cut these out for you ready to use so if you want to use your own portrait for this you can copy these blocks in on top of it and if you want to shoot something for this to fit in with the lighting that we used here notice we shot our portrait here with the light coming in from the left of the camera with the window here so this was just shot using simple lit window lights with the light coming in from the left and then our blocks were photographed under the same conditions and shooting different elements under the same conditions like this just helps everything to fit together more naturally when we create our fantastical composite so let's get started I'm going to begin by opening up my portrait and the backdrop here I'll just drag them both into Photoshop to open them and then I'll go to this image here and I'll start off by cutting out the head and the arm so I'll grab the quick selection brush from the tools panel over here and I'm just going to paint over the head here to select it make sure to include the hair as well and also the arm here and if we get any areas that we don't want we can hold alt and then paid to subtract them from the selection like this so I'm just going to subtract the neck and any of the little bits that we don't want and once I've got a decent selection here I can click refine edge to make it a lot better so I could pass up the radius here bring it around about 4 pixels and we can also paint around the hair to increase the area of refinement around here and try and pick up some of these strands of hair just by painting over the area with the refine radius tool so I'll choose output to new layer here and then hit OK to apply and then I can drag the cutout across to my clean background image so I'm just going to grab the move tool and notice I've got show transform controls auto-select layer checked up here and this is really useful when making composites like this it just gives us a bounding box around the layer and it allows us to click around the image to select different layers so they're both really useful features to have turned on when you're making a composite with lots of different layers like this so now I'll click and drag the header up to the tab off the other image and then down and release to copy it over and then I can position it wherever I choose I could perhaps make it slightly larger if I like now at the moment the arm is looking a bit wonky I'd like to make it look more upright to give the illusion of more of a free-standing structure here so what I'll do is go to edit puppet warp and then I can click pin so I'm just going to click one pin on the forehead there one on the wrist and one at the base of the arm here and I'll drag that lower pin along like that to straighten out the arm and then hit enter to apply I think pouch will just make the layer slightly smaller as well so that's my cutout prepared now we can start adding in our blocks so let's go back into Bridge here and as I say we've got a selection of blocks here that we've already cut out so they're all ready to be used in your own portraits and I'm going to add in this one here so I drag it into Photoshop to open it up and it's a PNG file which means it preserves transparency so that gives us our cut out of section again I'll just drag it up to the tab of my main image using the move tool and down in and release to copy it over and I'll position it roughly where I want it over the arm here like that and perhaps just make it slightly smaller now I'd like to blend in the pixels on the portrait with the pixels on the block and I can do that by using a couple of different layer techniques so let's go to our layers panel by going to window layers we'll bring that up and first of all let's go to the blend mode drop-down at the top here and change the blend mode of that block layer in fact let's just rename the layer here we'll call it armed blocks I'm gonna call this layer cut out and we'll go to the arm block layer and change the blend mode here from normal to multiply and notice how we start to get the effect that we're after because by multiplying the pixels we're allowing the darker pixels to be added to one another which is giving us all these nice crevices and shadows in the blocks but at the moment it's not looking all that convincing so we need to do a few more things to help blend it in first of all we can double click the layer here in the layers panel to bring up the layer style options here and in the top of the less-than option so you have the blending options and the blend if options down here allow us to blend pixels on one layer with those below in different ways if I drag the white point in you can see we can start to knock out parts of the lighter pixels on our block layer so we can start to remove some of the faces of the blocks or anywhere where lighter pixels show up and this helps to reveal the detail and the texture of the skin on the layer below now if we hold alt and drag the different halves of these little slider here we can split the slider up and this create a blend between these two points which gives us more of a natural result so we just need to experiment to find a point where we lose the surface of the blocks but still keep the dark shadows that we're after I think somewhere around about there is working quite nicely now we can also do the same on a different color Channel here if we go to the blend if drop-down and select red now our blocks are predominantly red in color so by layering again the lighter point in the red Channel reaching again knock some more of those pixels out and that gives us quite a nice result now we want to constrain the shape of the blocks to the cutout layer below so I can hold alt and click the line between the two layers to clip the block layer to the shape of the cutout so that only the areas that sit directly on top of that layer show through that's looking slightly neater around the top of the arm here but around the bottom we still want to see some of those blocks because you want to give the illusion that it's a pile and of course the base of the pile is important for creating that illusion so to do this we needed to create a copy of both of these layers here so I'm going to command or control click on both layers there to highlight them hit command or ctrl + J that's command J on a Mac ctrl J on a PC to create a copy and I'm just going to drag those two copies down below my original layers there so they sit below them in the layers panel I'm also going to get rid of these settings that I've applied so I'm going to again all click to unclip that layer and we'll just right click over the layer style options there and clear layer style to get rid of that blending effect next I'm going to hold alt and click the add layer mask icon here at the bottom of the layers panel to add a full black mask to that lower block layer to completely hide it and then I'm just going to reveal the areas that I want so grab the brush tool I've set my foreground color to white I can use the left and right square bracket keys on my keyboard to resize the brush tip and I'll just paint around here to reveal the blocks in this area like this you if I go too far and add areas that I don't want I can hit X to flip my foreground color to black and then just paint to blend in those edges like that so that allows us to add in some of those blocks around the base now we need to add some skin texture over them so what we'll do is highlight that lower cut out layer grab the lasso tool and I'm just going to make a rough selection of some of the nearby skin to the area that we want to cover up so I'm just going to select this area here with the lasso tool and I'll hit command or ctrl + J to copy that area to a new layer and then I'm going to drag that above the lower block layer that we just added that mask - then we can do sort of the opposite to what we did here we can hold alt and click the line between the two layers to create a clipping mask to clip that extra bit of skin to the block layer that reveals these areas around the edges here then we can grab the move tool and we can click on the bounding box on that skin layer and just drag it across to cover up the extra parts of our block then all we need to do is change the blend mode here to multiply and just adjust the opacity here until it looks about right somewhere around about there I think we might want to get rid of this hard line here in which case we can just highlight a cut out layer here add a mask to that layer grab the brush tool set our foreground color to black and then just paint to blend in this area around here like this we do the same over this half so you can see now how it's starting to take shape we can do the same over this area of the blocks here so once again I'll highlight that lower cut out copy layer make a quick selection on some nearby surrounding skin duplicate that with command or control + J and then drag it above the block layer and it'll automatically get added into that clipping group then I can grab the move tool click on the bounding box and reposition it over the area that I want and then once more changed to blend mode to multiply adjust the layer opacity slightly and we're going to need to add a mask the reason why these bits is showing up is because we can see the shadow on that block layer so I just need to add a mask to confine the edges here just to tidy up these little edges around here so this is all about just working around the image adding masks where you need them to reveal or hide parts of your layers until everything kind of fits together nicely like this and if we go up a little bit further there's a little section of the arm here that I'd quite like to remove so I need to knock out that little section there on the cutout layer here but if we just hide that I also need to just get rid of the areas on the cutout copy layer here so I'm just going to highlight that first of all zoom out slightly I'm just going to add a layer mask and paint over the top half of the image here just to hide the head just so we're only really needing to use the section down here at the base and then with that done I can go back to the other cutout layer zoom in to that little section and now I'll be able to remove it using the brush tool and painting on the layer mask there so I'm just going to paint black around this area here now I need to be quite precise with my painting I can hold shift and click between one point and another to draw a straight line between them which is really useful when trying to paint precisely around straight edged blocks like this then I can just finish off and get rid of the rest of the section like that so that just helps to add a bit of interest around these areas and make the whole thing look a little bit more realistic and we can then go on to add other block layers in exactly the same way so we could add a section of blocks to the face here first of all actually we may need to just hide this part of that block layer just so that we can constrain the blocks here to the shape of the arm so I'll highlight that top book layer add another layer mask grab the brush tool and again I can paint this black just to hide that area so a lot of this is just about identifying the layers that are showing up and where you want to reveal or hide them and then adding layer masks and painting where you need to now let's get back into bridge here and we'll try another layer so I'm just going to open up this cutout here so again I'll just drag it into Photoshop grab the move tool copy it over to our main image position it wherever we like and again we'll change the blend mode here to multiply we can copy that same layer style over so I'll right-click over the little square icon here on that layer and choose copy layer style I'll go to that other block layer and paste layer style and then I'll hold alt and click the line here to add that into the clipping group and it gives us that kind of effect now it's still looking quite dark so we may just need to lighten this less likely so I can hit command or ctrl + L for levels and then I'll just lift that layer until it looks right like that and again I'll add a layer mask and paint to hide the areas that I don't want around here so now our effect is starting to take shape and we can add further cutout block layers in exactly the same way so that's perhaps add one more to the top of the head so I'll go back into bridge let's have a look through will perhaps open up this one here so again just drag it into Photoshop use the Move tool to copy it saver position it where we want it and once more you can take the blend mode clip it to the rest paste the layer style over and then if we need to adjust the levels and finally add a layer mask to that top layer so you can see how once we get started it's actually easier that it might look to build up the effect and of course I'm doing this fairly quickly but you might want to spend a bit more time just fine-tuning things I'm just going to add one more layer here for this section of the hand so let's go back into bridge and we'll open up this one here maybe drag it in position it clip it with the other layers change the blend mode here to multiply and paste the layer style and then of course just go in and fine-tune the area using layer masks so I just need to paint over this section here to tidy up and around these parts here and now I'm pretty happy with how that's looking so I'm just going to zoom out slightly and I'll finish off by adding a tonal effect on top of everything so I'll hit command or control shift alt and E and that will merge a copy of all of the layers here and I'm just going to go to the Camera Raw filter to apply my tonal changes you need Photoshop CC to use the Camera Raw filter if you don't have CC you can always just go ahead and make thermal adjustments in any other way you like perhaps by using adjustment layers but I'm going to use the Camera Raw filter so I'll go to filter Camera Raw filter and I'd like to increase the clarity that perhaps up these shadows a little bit let's lower the highlighter touch we can add a vignette using the radial filter I can describe that lower the exposure slightly and then hold command or control and double click to add a darkening effect to the edges of the frame here let's perhaps tweak the temperature as well to cool things down a touch and then we can go in perhaps with the adjustment brush dial in some positive exposure and just paint to lift any areas that we want like this and then hit OK to apply and that's my finished effect so there we go that's how to create your very own surreal portraits by using a combination of blend modes blended controls and layer masks

Channel: Photoshop Edu

Views: 27,320

Rating: 4.9497209 out of 5

Keywords: compositing, movie poster, photoshop 2017, arunz creation, photo effects, photoshop cs6, photoshop cs6 tutorial, photoshop tutorial, photoshop, photoshop manipulation tutorial

Id: OCtBAC-6Yno

Length: 17min 24sec (1044 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2017