Tutorials & Links

[afex]

Firstly make sure you're familiar with layer modes. The option is a drop down menu at the top of the layer pallete, that says "normal" as a default.

You can change that to blend the layer in different ways to the layer below it. It's _very_ usefull


Starting out with this image of a woman.


Put the Cracked stock image over her where you want the cracks to be, set the layer mode to multiply before hand so you can see where you're putting them and also because it makes a good starting blend.


Now take a decent sized soft edge eraser brush, and erase out all the unwanted texture from the stock photo. Make sure the brush is small enough so the seft transparent edge of the brush isn't accidentally erasing the crack. You want to erase everything other than the crack and a little bit of texture outside of it for blending purposes.


Now combine this crack layer with the face layer by clicking the empty square next to the layer making the link icon appear like so.


Once you have that, flatten the layers together by pressing Control + E. Now select all by pressing Control + A, copy (control +c). Now that you have it copied, Undo all your steps untill your layers back to how they were before you flattened them. Once they're seperated paste down that flattened copy you made. Now you should have a flattened layer. And under it the 2 layers you flattened to make it.

I do this a lot through out the rest. Because I like having the original layers incase I need to go back, or resuse them, which I do a lot. So get familiar with this.

Now duplicate the crack layer that you used and drag the duplicate up to the top of all the layers, and set it to Soft Light. Just to add more shadow and light to the crack areas.


Now do the whole flattening, copying, undoing, pasting thing again just like you did before. So you can keep these layers and have a seperate layer as the flattened effects.

Now make a duplicate of that flattened layer, and greyscale it by pressing Control + U. and slide the Saturation bar to the left down to -100 and press ok.