A Work in Progress: Redemption Song

This guide was made for entry:
Redemption Song
In Contest:
african man

Original image

step 1 of 12

Mask the guy out.

step 2 of 12

To create the background, I had to tile the cloud stock image and clone out any harsh lines that would be visible around the man.

step 3 of 12

Man in front of background.

step 4 of 12

Created a curves adjustment layer above the Man's layer. Dragged the curve down slightly to make the image of the man darker. Use the Man's layer as a clipping mask (Alt click the line between the two layer) so that the adjustment is only to the man's image and not the back ground.

step 5 of 12

Gave a mask to the curves adjustment layer. Filled the mask in with white to show the orignal, un-adjusted image. THEN, (on the mask) went over the areas I wanted to darked with a large, soft brush. Since this layer is clipped to the previous layer, I don't have to worry about going outside the lines.

step 6 of 12

Since, the results of the previous step were a little too stark, I duplicated the adustment layer (Ctrl + J), then added a Gaussian Blur to bottom the adjustment layer.

step 7 of 12

Then, I repeated the whole process with another curves adjustment layer. But this time I dragged the curve upwards to lighten the Man's image. Paint over the parts that needed to be highlighted.

step 8 of 12

The background made the image look too color-shifted to me, so I did a little tweaking to adjust the "mood".

step 9 of 12

Next I made a composite layer from all of the existing layers (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E). Then ran the Glowing Edges Filter. Duplicated this layer. Set the blend mode to the bottom Glowing Edges to Screen and the top Glowing Edges to Overlay. Then I played with the Opacity settings of both layers.

step 10 of 12

To put the clouds in front of him, I just duplicated the background layer and dragged it to the top of the stack. Set the blend mode to Screen and lowered the Opacity. Then erased the parts I didn't want with a large, soft brush. I lowered the Opacity and the Flow of the Brush alot and often while doing this to get a more random effect.

step 11 of 12

New layer with a dark color (somewhere around 70%-80% grey), Then ran the Radial Blur filter. Offset it, and set the Blend Mode to Screen. Then, used a large, soft brush to mask out the unwanted portion.

step 12 of 12

Erased the unwanted part of the 2 water drop stock photos and set the Blend Mode to Screen. Then copied, transformed, rotated, and placed the pieces as necessary.

sources used for this step:

: source
1: source 1

Final result

Comments

downoffthedragon says:

You didn't tell me how you did the eyes! And thank you for mentioning the unclip selection so that adjustments don't effect other layers. I didn't know how to do that before.

(5 years and 3768 days ago)

Pxleyes

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