The following tutorial is based on being familiar with the basics of Photoshop.
The first step is to assemble the desired pictures you want to use. The example below uses
only three elements: the background and two manipulated pictures.
The first step requires making a colored background. Open a new project and decide
what color and size you want to make it. Make sure you select a size that is bigger
than the largest size of any of the pictures you will be adding. You can always crop
the picture down to size when you're done playing.
Use the select > all in the drop down menu
and then use the fill command to add the color.
The next step is to open a new image and use it as texture to add interest and alternated
colors to the final picture.
For my example I used a farmland graphic and tilted it 90 degrees clockwise.
I next wanted to alter the graphic to make the colors more blended and subtle.
Go into filters > artistic and select a filter of your choice. For this example I chose
Pallet Knife to smooth out the graphic so you could no longer tell it was a farm scene.
After you have altered the picture, go into the drop down menu and select > all and copy
the image. Go back to your background image and use the paste command to place it on top of the
background layer.
The next step is to open another image to use as the primary photo, in this case, a grayscale
photo of the delectable "Denise Bryson."
To further enhance the overall effect, I elected to sepia tone the grayscale photo. If you
do not use a grayscale picture, skip this next step.
To sepia tone this photo, convert the grayscale image to CMYK mode and then adjust the
color balance to get the desired effect. The following formula will get you close to what I
ended up with, color wise.
Shadows: 30 left (cyan)/5 middle (magenta)/-45 right (yellow)
Midtones: 68 left (cyan)/-10 middle (magenta)/-10 right (yellow)
Highlights: 33 left(cyan)/0 middle (magenta)/-18 right (yellow)
This will get you in the general vicinity of a sepia tone look. If it's not quite what you want,
play with it.
Next, I want to soften the edges of the photo. I do this by using the layer mask feature.
Click on the add layer mask at the bottom of the layers palette. At this point you can either
use a feathered brush or the gradient tool. For this project I used a very large (100+) size
feathered brush and painted around the image on the layer mask. This will reduce the hard
edges and make it easier to blend in with the rest of
the composition.
When you're done, go to select > all and copy the image. Go back to your original
background image and paste it on top of the other layers.
Now comes the fun part. Once you've layered all the individual pictures together, the next step is
to adjust them to vary
how they interact with each other.
This is the formula I used in this particular project:
Layer #1 (the background) was not altered. It was set to normal in the pallet choice box.
Layer #2 (the altered farm graphic) was adjusted using the overlay command and toned down to
63 percent of its original strength.
Layer #3 (sepia tone Denise) was adjusted to luminosity at 89 percent strength.
The percentage changes allow you to tone down or up the visibility of the picture to suit your taste. In this
case the above percentages allowed all the elements to blend in with each other the way I wanted.
You also have many other choices in the layer pallet besides overlay and luminosity to play with.
Soft or hard light and screen are also good choices to play around with. It just depends on
what effect you are looking for. The key here is to play, play, play.
So, what do you get when you put it all together? Hopefully you'll get something like this.
Once you are satisfied with your work you can either save it as a .psd (Photoshop) file
(which will save all your layers and settings) or save as a .jpg if you decide never
to play around with it again.
Isn't "she" lovely?