Photoshop Tutorial Library

How to do this.

Step 1. We pick a pair of pictures: one of a body - which must include dark parts and one of a landscape. In case they aren’t black and white, we go Image > Adjustements > Desaturate.

Step 2. We put both of them in the same canvas, the landscape on top of the body, and put it in Screen or Lighten 100%.

Step 3. We cut the landscape picture with the shape of the body.Like this.

Step 4. I left the hair because I’m too lazy. From now we use theEraser Tool (selecting a blurred one) to delete the landscape off the head and the top of the back. And this is what I got:

Oh well.. this one is a little bit complicated, so I’ll make a lot of steps for you to understand. I’ll show you how to do this

1. We’ll start by opening our image. I’d recommend you work with a black and white image in order to get the full spectrum of the watercolors to be visible. Or just desaturate it. Also the image must have a white backgroung. 

2.Now, we want to white out her face a little bit and define some of her features. Go to Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast. Depending on the quality of the picture, the adjustments and the settings are going to be different for every image. Basically, you want her face to be almost ghostly white and the contours of her face and hair to be almost black.

3. After you’ve done that, we will duplicate the layer by going to Layer > Duplicate Layer.

4. Now, we will apply the Watercolor Filter to your duplicated image. Make sure you have the duplicated layer selected in your Layers Palette (it should be highlighted in blue when you click on it). Go to Filter > Artistic > Watercolor. Leave the settings as they are and press OK. 

5. Select your original/base layer NOT your ‘watercolor’ layer and go toImage > Adjustments > Threshold. My settings can be seen here. Just try to replicate how my image looks like.

6. Now, comes the fun part or so I think. We will be using these two textures:ONE, TWO (courtesy of this website). Open both of the textures by going to File > Open. Now create a new file by going to File > New with the same dimensions as the image we are working on and basically all you will be doing is cutting out various areas of the two watercolor textures we opened and pasting them to the new document we created. We want to aggregate all of the watercolor splotches/splatters where Jesy is. I used ‘multiply’ as blending mode when I pasted each section and merged the image at the end. You are kind of creating your own texture in a way and you will use this finished canvas to bring our other black and white picture to color. So, if your subject is positioned on the right you’d want to concentrate majority of the splatters to the right. Try not to have too big of empty spaces between the splatters because there will be a gap in color in your finished image. Once you’re done and have merged your image, copy and paste it on top of your base/original image. Our layers should look like this.

7. In this step, we will be working with Layer Masking. Select our merged layer and press CTRL+A (select all), followed by CTRL+C. All that is doing is copying our merged layer. Now, select our layer with the watercolors and at the bottom of the layers palette create a Layer Mask by clicking this symbol. This will appear next to our watercolor layer. Now hold ALT and click on the layer mask (the white box next to our layer). If you did it right, your whole image will turn white and you’ll notice that the rest of the layers are shaded and not visible. Now, click CTRL+V (paste) and your base image should appear in the white space (layer mask), like so. Now, click CTRL+I (invert colors) and your layers should look like this and your image like this. Click back on the watercolor layer to see the image (I added a star to which section you should click on) and your image should be covered in watercolor splatters.

8. In this step, we will be using this paper texture from Bashcorpo. Open it up like we normally would and then copy and paste it on top of our image and select Linear Burn as our blending option, like so. Our image should look something like this.

And that’s everything! I know is long but it was necessary. Hope you like it, if you have any doubt or a tutorial request for any of my edits don’t be shy and go to my ask box I’ll be glad to help you. 

This is my finished image: