The Making of Mystic

By Nik Ainley

In this tutorial Nik Ainley walks us through the process of making a spectacular image. This tutorial focuses on the big picture steps taken to create this image. You'll learn some incredible techniques in this tutorial, and get a view into how Nik creates beautiful photo-manipulation based images. Let's check it out.

The Final Result:

Let's Tutorials:

Step 1

Chances are you will need to do some work to your photo before starting, even if it is of high quality. My photo is of a good size to use as my canvas, so I am happy to just open it up in Photoshop and work on it directly. Its size is 2912 x 4368 pixels. Working at high resolution gives greater control, and will allow the image to be printed at a decent size in the future if needed.

The first thing that strikes me is the image is too dark. To sort this out I run a shadows/highlight adjustment on it to bring out the dark sides of the face without completely killing the contrast.

Next I want to neutralize the color cast of the image slightly, so I perform a color balance adjustment. I add some more blue, cyan and green into the image until I find the skin tone a more pleasing color. Since I will be getting rid of the background, hair, and clothing, the face is really the only part that I am concerned with here.

The final thing I do is to clone tool out his few freckles/spots. I find them distracting and unnecessary. Use the healing tool if you like, but I find the clone tool a lot more reliable.

Step 2

Now for the almost inevitable step that every photo-manipulator hates, extraction. I want to cut out the background so it doesn't distract me. I can replace it later if necessary. Now there are endless ways to extract an image, and which one to use really depends on what you are trying to cut out. In this case, I have a fairly irregular shape but nothing overly complex. That means I can't just do it by hand.

First, I create a layer behind my photo and fill it with a bright color (yellow here) that contrasts sharply with it. This is so that when I start cutting him out I will see very easily which pixels I am hiding. I then add a layer mask, zoom in, and start tracing around his face with a small brush. Since I plan to cover up the hair and neck, I just roughly cut these out for now. No point tracing carefully around something that's going to be hidden anyway.

For a bit more detail on this method of extraction, here's a very old tutorial of mine that should still be helpful: Extraction

Step 3

Once I had extracted what I wanted, I changed the yellow background layer to black as I wanted this image to have a dark background. The face is leaning a bit so I wanted to rotate it to a better alignment. To help I added a couple of guides. Then I lined up the eyes and nose with them as best as I could.

Step 4

I also wanted to turn the face to look at me so it is more symmetrical. To do this I used a warp transform to pull the face into a better alignment.

Step 5

Now although I don't want the face to be perfectly symmetrical, I did find the right (his left) eye a bit too closed. I decided to replace it with a reflected version of the other eye. To do this took a few steps.

First, I duplicated the face and reflected it horizontally using the transform tool. I then dropped the opacity down and aligned the reflected eye over the one I wanted to replace before putting it back to 100% opacity. I then added a 'reveal none' layer mask (hold down ALT while Clicking the add layer mask icon). Then, using a big soft brush, I brushed white onto the mask over the old eye to reveal the new eye. This way I made sure the new eye blended in nicely.

PS I have added a gradient to the background here. There was no particular reason to this, just one of the many little things I do while making an image depending on how I feel. You'll notice more small irrelevant changes like this throughout the article.

Step 6

I also decided that his eyes were a little too puffy, and so smoothed the skin out just below them. To do this took a few steps as well.

Basically, I cloned skin from his cheeks up to just below his eyes. However, the skin on his cheeks is actually lighter, although it may not look it, so a straight clone would not work. The healing brush also failed here so it has to be done manually. First, I duplicated the face layer, and very roughly cloned skin from his cheeks upwards so that it covered all the area I wanted to smooth.

Next I added a reveal none layer mask and dropped the opacity to 50% or so. This opacity change is because I didn't want to completely remove the folds beneath the eyes, as that would look odd. Next I brushed white onto the layer mask over the areas I wanted to affect. This looked a little too light so I slightly darkened the top layer using a curves adjustment (pull the middle of the curve down slightly). If there had been no difference in lightness between the two areas, I could have done this all in one step with the clone tool. This method works where lightness/colour adjustments are needed though.

Step 7

Wow, so after all that the main image is basically ready for use (hah! I wish, as you will see I have to make more adjustments later, but it's good for the moment). Now it's time to bring in our next photo. This is another high resolution image, approximately the same size as the first, from iStock.

Step 8

As before, I needed to extract this photo to make it ready for use. With an image set against a flat background like this that job is slightly easier. I find the best way to do these extractions is to use the RGB channels. I took a look at these channels to see which had the most contrast between the background and object, in this case the blue channel.

Next I duplicated this channel. Then in the curves adjustment window, selected the set black point dropper, and chose a very light grey. This changed every pixel from that light grey and lighter to black. I tend not to choose the lightest grey possible, as this results in very jagged edges because you basically cause aliasing. To make sure that you are getting all of your image requires a little more work.

Tip: If you do end up with jagged edges in your channel, there is a way to help smooth them out. Run a series of very light Gaussian blurs (1 pixel or less) on your channel. Then using a levels adjustment, pull the two outer sliders towards the middle until your channel sharpens up again, but stop before it gets jagged. Be careful though as this method can cause the smoothing of corners as well so fine details might get cut out of your selection.

Step 9

Using the magic wand tool, I selected the big white areas outside and in the middle of the frame. I then inverted this selection, contracted by a couple of pixels, and filled the resulting selection with black. I now had a perfect black shape in the parts of the image I want and white where I didn't want it. This is actually the exact opposite of what I want, as white represents the bits of the image that will be selected, so I had to invert this channel. I then CNTRL + Clicked on this channel to produce a selection. Then making sure the RGB channel was active, copied and pasted into my main document.

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