Create an Unique Surreal Photo Manipulation with Nebula Effect in Photoshop

Tutorial Details

Program: Adobe Photoshop CS5
Difficulty: Intermediate
Estimated Completetion Time: 1- 2 hours

In this Photoshop tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to Create an Unique, Dark Surreal Photo Manipulation with Nebula Effect in Photoshop. This is an intermediate level tutorial so some steps can be a bit tricky, but why not have a try

Along the way, we will be using some simple retouch skills, as well as some custom brushes and the liquify filter to produce special effect.

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Here is a preview of the final effect I have for this tutorial:

You will need the following stocks:

Crack Texture
Model by faestock
Eagle
Smoke Brush

Step 1

Create a new document with black background sized 800px * 1100px. Load the crack texture into Photoshop and cut out a piece of it and paste it onto our document, compress it down and perspective it with the free transform tool:

Use a soft eraser to remove the edges off the texture as shown below:
Hint: set the eraser flow and opacity to around 50% both. This will help creating depths and light on the ground.

Add the following 3 adjustment layers to the ground texture layer as clipping mask:

Black and White

Levels

Curves

and here is the effect so far:

Step 2

Create a new layer and use either the smoke brushset and the cloud filter to add some cloud effect

Load the model image into Photoshop, cut out the model and paste it onto our document – don’t worry if the edges is a bit rough, it’s not important in the tutorial: