I have been struggling deciding on something that I wanted to create this week, I chose to work on an image of my daughter that I have been looking at for a while. In the photo the background is terrible and I thought she looked lost in thought, while I was thinking of this it came to me that she looked like her mind was wandering away and so I decided to create an image that I felt represented that idea.
Creating this image was not to difficult, having lots of practice removing people from backgrounds has been really helpful and because of that I was able to remove her from the background quickly. on the next layer I duplicated her extracted image and had to liquify her image to get a background to pull the image effect from so I stretched her image out with the liquify tool. I had to create another layer to cut out the back of her image to create the smoke effect. Once I did that I put layer masks where I needed and used a brush to create the smoke effect. This process took the most time as I redid it a dozen times trying to get the feel right. I had to constantly shift the brushes around and change sizes throughout the entire process but the end result looked great. I added a background that had a lot of the same colors in it and reduced the opacity as well as inserted a grunge border to box her the rest of the way in. It was a fun process to see it all come together.
Credit for images: Model: Sidney Draper, Photo taken by Cameron Draper Background: https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/pink-bright-texture-designer-background-gentle-1040229760 Brushes: https://www.brusheezy.com/brushes/57840-20-smoke-ps-brushes-abr-vol-5 Border: Grunge Border Tools Used: Clipping Mask, Quick Select, Brushes, Gradient Map, Opacity,Mask and Select.