PHOTOSHOP TUTORIAL of Extraterrestrial Self Portrait! >> Plus feel free to steal my notes!

Oh. My. Gosh. It has been driving me CRAZY that my tutorials have been of such bad quality. Seriously embarrassing. So I did some research this week, and thanks to Aaron Nace’s Phlearn Tutorial on Screen Capturing, I found the best way to do it. ROCK ON! ScreenFlow, you rock!

I’ve been receiving SO MANY QUESTIONS about this photo! Next time I do a big edit like this I am going to record it as I go from the start so that you can have a fulllll tutorial. Won’t that be awesome? But since I can’t go back in time, I had to work backwards with this one. Which might be a benefit, because this edit took me about two hours to do, whereas this video only took about ten minutes to quickly go through each step.

ENJOY!

Promised Links: The Photoshop Actions. Facebook Photoshop Group. Frequency Separation Technique. The Online Store. 

Want to see the Behind The Scenes video of this shoot? Click here.

1) I took a variety of photos with the flowers alternating places on the face in each shot.

2) I brought all of these shots into Photoshop and mixed them together to make it appear that the flowers were there on their own.
The “secret” behind adding the flowers = Layer Masks.

3) Then I worked on clearing out the background.
The “secret” to adding the background = Command + Alt + Shift + E merges all the layer. Then I take my rectangular marquee tool ( ). I selected the cleanest area of the background, copy pasted it, and stretched the sides of it. I then duplicated the layer (command+J) and flipped it by dragging the corners to the opposite side. I then put it in place, and used a layer mask to finely outline my hair and body from the new background.

4) I then used Frequency Separation technique. Please check out a full tutorial of it here (this is how I learned it).

5) I added definition with my “CONTOUR” Photoshop action. [buy it today here] I pressed play and then used my black brush to draw over all of the shadowed parts, and my white brush at a low, soft opacity to draw over all of the highlighted parts.

6) I added “Boom Boom Pow” Photoshop action at 52% only to the flowers [buy it today here].

7) I added “Boom Boom Pow” Photoshop action at 39% only to my eyes [buy it today here].

8) Brighten.

9) I used “Alex’s Sharpy” [buy it today here] only on the eyeballs using layer masks.

10) I adjusted the hair to add more volume.

11) I changed the colour of my hair by adding a layer on Color Mode and added the blue colour to the hair.

12) I added “Scarlet Love” at 52% Photoshop action at 52%[buy it today here].

13) I added “Poison Ivy” at 50% Photoshop action at 50% [buy it today here].

14) I changed the colour of my lips by adding a layer on Color Mode.

15) I changed the colour of the flowers by adding a layer on Color Mode.

16) I added the “Maracas” Photoshop action [buy it today here].

17) I used some editing of my own to boost the colour even further.