Here ya go, Pat. This is not exactly a tutorial, more a look at the workflow for this job.
(The finished pic has since been colour tweaked, after a pointer from Hannie)
When I start a job, I don’t have a fixed plan of how to go about things. Some people know immediately what to do. I dive in blind and try things out and experiment along the way.
PICS 1,2 & 3.
firstly, a new background was made by taking the left and right sides and stretching them with free-transform so they met in the middle. Then use Gaussian Blur at maximum strength.
PICS 4,5 & 6.
When working, every so often layers are flattened, so there's no pics of the jaw line or cheek being built, but to the left of pic 4 you can see that there's a couple of blurred brushed tones to demonstrate how to go about painting skin. It doesn't matter at this point that the skin looks too smooth, when the grain layer is added later, it makes even the most dodgy things look a bit more photographic!
Pic5 shows a little more work smoothing the nose. The pic is a little lighter and less red because there's now a layer of 50% grey above it, set to screen at 15%. The duff side of the mouth was remade by taking the good side, flipping it and stretching.
At this point i was still wondering what to do with the skin colour.
PICS 7, 8 & 9
Not a lot happening in pic 7, but made a start on the hair, which eventually got done by taking the good bits and warping and stretching. Pic 8 shows how i dealt with getting the skin colour improved - painted yellow layer, colour dodge at 15% and pic 10 shows the result.
PICS 10, 11 & 12
Pic 11 was time to start work on the shirt. The blue shirt was just me playing around and trying things out. After a while decided the only way through this was to rebuild the shirt. I'll talk about that in a moment.
Pic 12 - painted in little highlights and blurred splodges, such as the dimple here, which i've duplicated and dragged to the side so you can see it. It's common for me to have large numbers of layers each with a single
fragment or blurred thing, and once they're all positioned and it looks ok i'll merge them all together.
PICS 13, 14 & 15
Even though the shirt is a complete mess, theres still evidence of a cross-hatch pattern there. pic 13 shows a sample of pattern, made simply by drawing long thin rectangles at different opacities, duplicating the layer and using free-transform to rotate 90 degrees. put some purple behind , and merge those layers together and there you go.
Pic 14 shows the same pattern, but now with the forward warp tool used to make ripples. You go to filter>liquify and then click the forward warp brush icon. Liquify is a very powerful set of tools, and along with forward warp there's other cool things like the bloat tool. Pic 15 shows the pattern, now darkened with curves, warped and positioned.
PICS 16 & 17
16 shows the collar (note that forward warp has been used on that, too). Also a sample of the flower motif has been drawn on a new layer, using the original as a reference.
17 shows the process of using edit > transform > warp. to try and make the flower pattern appear more convincing, the warp method here can bend an object so it follows the folds in fabric.
PICS 18, 19 & 20
Going back to the face, here's how the eye was done. It's not a flip-over job. That method hardly ever works for eyes, unless the sitter is looking straight at the camera and the face is evenly lit on both sides. No, avoid that method. Start off by taking the good eye, lasso it and copy it onto a new layer above. For now, it looks weird but at least both eyes are looking in the same direction.
Pic 19 is showing the use of the clone brush to change the slant of the eyelid. Because the damaged eye is closer to the camera, the duplicate eye should be enlarged a little with free transform. From there onward, it's a case of zooming in, adding little highlights and dark areas, more cloning and taking regular breaks.
Pic 20 is the finished eye. Notice how the grain is added, and makes the fabricated thing more realistic? I use a plug-in called GrainSurgery. It has loads of preset grain types to match almost any photo. Make a new layer, fill it with 50% grey, apply the grain and set the blending mode to Overlay.
Well that’s that. Thanks for reading this, and I hope you benefited from it. If you’re not sure about anything please ask.
