Face up to foliage
Blend a photo with graphical elements to create a surreal portrait in Photoshop
This surreal effect may look intricate and complicated, but merely by making use of the graphics and backgrounds that ship with Elements, it’s something that anybody can do, and on any portrait they like. We’re making use of a simple graphic called Brass Leaves, which you’ll find within the hundreds of graphics, frames and effects that come with Elements, in our tutorial. However, if you prefer, you could always use one of the other graphics.
By duplicating and reshaping the leaves in different ways you can build up an entire bush. Once that’s been done, all you have to do is duplicate the cut-out face we’ve provided and ‘clip’ it to each layer, before applying a Drop Shadow layer style and changing the colours. To round things off, drop in a suitably green leafy background, also taken from the Elements graphics library.
Along the way we’ll repeatedly use one of Photoshop’s most useful and underused shortcuts – the humble Alt key. Let loose on the Layers Panel, it enables you to make speedy copies of layers, styles, masks and adjustments. It also lets you ‘clip’ a layer to the shape of the layer beneath. Here’s how it works...