Pelican

We're going to make this!
(Actually, I did it over for the tut. So the final outcome is a little tiny bit different from this, my original chop (see last pic).)



I chose this picture because it covers several of the techniqes I use most regularly, yet doesn't get too complicated. It does require some artistic skills in one area but thats about as tough as it gets. Its a picture that I made to use in the Birthcay card for The Black Mamba over at Worth1000. The 2 links below are my original source files, so download them and work along with me. I wanted to do one of the pictures that I entered in a contest here, but the PSD's and much of the source material were completely lost in a harddrive failure. So, lets have some fun!!!

Ps. I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts and I'm having troubles remembering where certain things even are in the menus, so please bear with me...
Also, If there is anything in here that your having troubles with, please feel free to ask. You can post questions here or PM me.


Download 1 Jessica Biel

Download 2 Birthbay doggie


To start with, we have to remove the background. As you will see, thats not going to be too hard. You can actually use the Magic Wand. First open the Jessica pic in photoshop and in your layers palette (Window, Layers) duplicate your 'Background layer' by right clicking on the layer and chosing Duplicate Layer. Now you should have 2 Jessicas.
Next, Select the original layer by clicking on it and then click the New Layer Icon at the bottom of the Layers Palette (its next to the trashcan). Type "d" to make sure your colors are set to default and with your Bucket Tool, fill it with black (Alt+Backspace is a good shortcut for the fill). Your Layers Palette should look like this now.



Next click the 'Background copy' layer to select it and get your magic wand out of the toolbox. Click on the large white area to select it then press shift and add the small white area behind her neck. Hit Backspace (Delete). You should now have this with the small trace line around her. With the 'Background copy' still selected, use your eraser to remove the white line.


Now lets start lightening her skin. This is going to start off a little spooky at first but hang in there.
Ctrl+click your 'background copy' layer to select Jessica. Create a new layer with the New layer Icon. Name it 'white face'. Type Ctrl+Backspace to fill it with white. Set the Opacity to 50%. Now erase, out of the white, her eyes and some of the area around them. Erase the white from her lips too.



Now lets set up an adjustment layer to bring some of the color back into her face. Ctrl+click the 'white face' layer to select it. Type Alt+L,J,L (Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Levels) to bring up a new adjustment layer and name it 'skin'. Set the adjustments in your histogram as follows and you should get the below result.

Note: Is this the 'right' color? I don't know. I was just looking for something that looked good to me. When creating a color using an adjustment layer such as Levels, the right color is usually in the eye of the creator (you). There are tricks to making it work as you'll see later.

Pelican

Balloon time!!!
Back out 33% or smaller and draw a Circular Marquee (Style- Fixed Aspect Ratio, Constraints- 1 to 1) just a bit bigger than the picture is tall.


Create a new layer and name it 'balloon'. Click the black square in your toolbox to bring up the Color Picker dialog and pick a red, any red. Fill it using your Bucket for example. I used this red.


Now type "d" to bring your colors back to default and type Ctrl+D to deselect. With your move tool (type "v"), grab the balloon and move it to the side like so.


Ctrl+click the 'balloon' layer to select the balloon and create a new layer calling it 'balloon shadow'. Get the brush tool from you toolbox and get a soft brush about 300 across. Set the opacity to 10% and brush in a shadow. Darker at the outside edges (more passes) and lighter in the middle (fewer passes) giving it a spherical look as well as reshaping it to the more egg-shaped balloon.


Create a new layer and call it 'balloon white'. Type "x" to reverse your default colors and with the same 300wide brush at 10%, start brushing a glare of light onto the balloon, brighter in the middle, more faint to the outside.



Make-up time!!
Heres where you get to be the artist cuz you actually have to draw this in. We also get to deal with the hot spots (the very bright areas on her right cheek and forehead).
First, take your marquee tool and draw a selection around her mouth. It doesn't matter how it looks. I start this type of thing off pretty sloppy cuz I just find it easier to put too much make up on and then erase it down to the point I want it. Thats just how I do it. Ok, we're putting this on top so make sure the 'balloon white' layer is selected. Go click on Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Levels (Alt+L,J,L) and name the layer 'makeup'. When the histogram opens set your adjustments like so.

Note that in the RGB adjustment, I pulled the white down to 167 on the output level. You need to do this or it will be way too saturated.






As you can see, we have a ways to go. Your default colors should automatically set themselves to white as the foreground color. If the foreground color is not white, type "x" to toggle the colors or click the flip arrows. With a 100 wide brush, I just paint in very sloppily as you can see.

Pelican

Looks pretty bad, huh!!
Special note:While working in an adjustment layer, you always paint with a white brush and erase with a black one. You can paint and erase as much as you need to get what you want.

Set your Opacity to 75%. Now just start erasing (remember, we erase with a black brush, not the Eraser Tool). I'm using a 35 pixel soft brush. Find the edges of her lips and her teeth. Don't worry about being messy around the teeth, its actually easier to paint the lips back in with a smaller white brush. Just flip back to white and touch it up.




Start carving the shape of the makeup out starting with larger brushes and decreasing them in size as you get it more detailed. Remember you can switch back to a white brush and paint your mistakes back in.


We see where, as I said earlier, that the color we made for the makeup doesn't respond well to the glare of the lights on her face. Here's what we do. Right click on your 'makeup' layer and Duplicate it. This will make all the makeup very dark. Too dark. Set you brush color to black and with a 300 wide soft brush set to 20% Opacity, start making full sweeps over her mouth until its almost back to where it was. Once that is looking good, move up to her left eye. Its not going to need as much because of the glare on her cheek but you will have to lighten it up some. On the right eye, just click over the eye 2 or 3 times and leave the up and down things alone. They look ok.


Eye color:
Zoom in and with your Poly Lasso make a selection around her left Iris. Click Layer, New Adjustment Layer, Levels. Name the new layer iris. Set the Red and Green up like this and leave the Blue and RGB alone.

Pelican

Ribbons

Time to open the picture of the party dog.

The red ribbon and the blue one are the ones we're going to use. You see that they both have a little dog hair covering them in a place or two. We'll fix that. The picture is also to small and the ribbons would be tiny.

The bd-doggie is a good quaility pic at 72 dpi. Quality pics can be as much as doubled in size if you're careful. Go to Image, Image Size and change the resolution to 125 pixels/inch.


With the white background and ribbons being a little out of focus, it will be easiest to just hack the ribbons out and drag them into the scene. Chopping them there will be much easier.


Chop the ribbons. I used the Poly Lasso with a feather of .5px. Where the dog's hair is covering the ribbons, try to follow the shape of a curled ribbon as well as you can. Chop deep to get all the white halo out and if it looks a little hacky when you're done, go to Fiter, Blur, Gaussian Blur and set it to 1.0. This covers a lot of sins.
When we dragged the ribbons into the picture, it created a new layer. Name that 'ribbons'. Ctrl+click the layer to select the ribbons and get your Clone Stamp out of the toolbox. Set your brush size to about 21 pixels, soft. Since we have selected the ribbons, we can't clone outside the marching ants. In the blue ribbon, select a blue sample (Alt+Click) and start covering the hair. Same with the red.


Next: Right click the 'ribbons' layer and Duplicate it. Now in your Layers Palette, grab the 'ribbons copy' layer and drag it down to just under the 'balloon' layer.


Click Edit, Transform, Flip Horizontal. Go again to Edit, Transform and chose Scale. Press Shift and Grab a corner. Scale it down to about 75%. Press Enter. Get your move tool and move it to the left a little.


Right click the 'ribbons copy' layer and Duplicate it. Ctrl+Click the 'ribbons copy 2' layer to select it and fill it with black. Set the layer Opacity at 50%.

Pelican

Last step....I think...
We're going to do an over all levels layer to warm it up a bit and cover some sins (that nasty edge thats been there the whole time on her left side. You didn't think I was going to let that show, did you).

Click the top layer 'ribbons' in your Layers Palette to highlight it. Now, as described many times before in this tut, go get a new levels adjustment layer. Name it 'over all'. In the histogram, leave the RGB and Red alone and set the Green and Blue like this.


With a 300 wide soft black brush, Opacity 100%, Clear her face leaving a dark shadow on her left side.

Done!! Once again, if you have any questions about this, post them here or PM me. I'll be happy to answer them.



Thanks! I hope this was helpful.

LogicBomb

Wow! thats one hell of a tutorial.

How long did this take you to put together?

__________________
You can’t argue with logic.
well, actually you could but you would lose so its a waste of your time.

Pelican

Thanks!

I think it took 3 days. All I remember for sure is that it was no easy chore. I was so surprised when I got done gathering the parts that I 38 screen caps that needed to be processed. Then getting everything sorted and into thread format was a lot harder than I thought it would be. That being said, I'll probably keep doing them now that I know what to expect.

Overflow

I actually registered to photochopz thanks to your tutorial, interesting and well done.

Coincidentally it was also my first serious attempt at photo manipulation, and i'm quite happy with the results:

joshbond

Wow! welcome to the site!

That came out really good too.

bc_2005