Create Leafy Face Photo Manipulation in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to create this “Leafy Face” manipulation in Photoshop. We will go through techniques such as layer blending, layer masks, filter effects, and the use of adjustment layers. Have a try! This is an intermediate level tutorial and some steps can be tricky.

Note: The Photoshop tutorial is done in CS6 – therefore some screenshot may have slighting different layout as in the earlier version. Some brushes are exclusive to Photoshop CS6.

Here is a preview of the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

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OK Let’s get started!

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:
Background texture
Face by faestock
Leaf stock 1
Leaf stock 2

Step 1

Create a new document sized 800px * 995px with white background. Load the background texture image into Photoshop and select the following portion:

Copy and paste the selection over to document and resize it to fit our canvas:

Apply the following “Watercolor” filter to this texture layer:

Use a big soft eraser to remove the following portions of the texture layer to create some depths:

Step 2

We will work on the face part of the manipulation in this step. Load the model image into Photoshop and cut out the head and neck part and paste it over to our document. Re-size and place it to the centre as shown below:

Use a rough eraser (grunge or splatter), remove the edges as shown below: (Make sure you set the eraser flow and opacity to around 30%, so you can gradually work through the edges without overdoing them, also make sure you adjust the eraser size)

Add the following adjustment layers as clipping masks to this face layer:

Layer mask on the black and white adjustment layer:

Levels

Layer mask on the levels adjustment layer:

Curves

and here is the effect so far:

Step 3

We will start adding the leaves in. Load the left stock 1 image into Photoshop and use the lasso tool to select the following portion:

Copy and paste the selection to our image and resize it as shown below:

Change the layer blending mode to “Screen” for this new leaf layer:

Repeat this process and add some more leaves to the areas shown below:

Step 4

Load the leaf stock 2 into Photoshop and select the following piece:

Copy and paste the selection over to our document, and apply the following Paint Daubs filter:

Change the layer blending mode of this leaf layer to “Multiply”. Repeat this process and add 2 leaves on both sides of the face:

Go back to the leaf stock 2 image and select another different piece. Again we copy and paste the selection to our document and reduce its size, then apply the following black and white adjustment to this layer:

And change the blending mode to “screen” for this leaf layer:

And here is the effect you will have:

Step 5

We will duplicate the new leaf layer we created in the previous step a few times. Keep their blending mode as “screen” and use the free transform tool to rotate, resize the layers, to form a line as shown below:

Add a few more transparent leaf layers to the top as shown below:

You can change the layer blending mode to “overlay” for those leaf layer and see what effect that brings you:

Step 6

We’re almost done! We will fine-tune the colours of the image by adding a new Vibrance adjustment layer on top:

And this is the final effect I have for this image: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy going through it and find it useful. Drop me a comment below if you have any question.
Till next time, have a great day!

Reference: http://www.psdvault.com/photo-effect/create-leafy-face-photo-manipulation-photoshop/#prettyPhoto