Note: The PSD is now available for download to members ONLY.

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Well I'm sort of bored at the moment, and I haven't done anything in photoshop aside from Salem GUI bits for about 2 weeks. So, I'm going to make a gothic-ish dark angel with blue tones for the hell of it.

Anyways, I'm going to be using another picture of Kruella in the infamous red Corset. For those that wonder why I use it so much, it's because she hasn't taken any new pis really since this set of photos. also there's like 30+, in various poses. Here's the picture I'm choosing:





Now duplicate your image, and drop out the background. Just use your preferred method, most people erase it, or use the extract filter. Personally I like to use extract, but the lighting on this image made it difficult. So, I took a 19pt hard eraser, and took out the big areas, then took a 1pt and 2pt hard eraser to clean up the details. It doesn't need to be perfect, here's what I've got now:




Now, I'm going to darken the image quickly by removing the reds, and blowing out the contrast a bit. Head on to Layers -> New Adjustment Layer -> Hue and Saturation. Click on 'Master' And change it to 'Reds'

Now drag the saturation slider to the left, till it's at -100. It should be fairly grayish. Then drag the lightness slider to the left a ways to make it more black; I'm personally using -70.
(Note: Sometimes when removing a color, it's secondary color remains. for red this color is magenta, so you may want to change from red to magenta and desaturate it as well, I did.)

Result:




Now go back to Layer -> New Adjustment Layer -> then Black and White
(Note: If you have CS2, you don't have B&W If I recall, you can get the same effect by clicking on 'Gradient Map' instead, and making it black and white.)

Now your whole image should be gray scale, BUT, that's now what I'm going for.
Set the Black and White adjustment layer to 'Overlay', if it comes out too dark, either set it to Soft Light instead, or just toy with the opacity. the overall effect should make the dark areas darker, and the light areas lighter:




Now at this point, I accidentally closed the PSD. So I had to re-extract everything and such, as such my image might differ slightly now. Either way, this was by far the hardest part of this piece..

Finding Wings.


Eventually I found a wing anatomy stock, and I took a simple brown wing, then resized it to fit the photo:
(Note: I'm placing it UNDER the 2 Adjustment Layers, you may need to mess with the levels so it's not too dark.)





Now to blend it..
Take an eraser, a nice soft one. Press F5 to open the brush settings, and check scattering.

Set it to a decent amount, this varies pic to pic.. for this size, I'm using about 150% scatter.
Now adjust the Flow of your erase to around 30%, and softly brush around the area where the wing meets skin. Mine came out like this:




Now drop your flow a bit more, about 15%-ish, and lower the opacity to around 50%
this way you don't over erase, and softly go around the area you blended, this should help it merge a bit better. It now looks like so:




Now repeat the same process for your other wing, no reed to repeat myself, I'll wait.
Mine came out like this, I lightened the wings a bit too, they were too contrasty for my taste.





Now I'm going to take THIS photo from Morguefile, and set it with low saturation for the background:




I'm setting my foreground color to: 0099e0 and my background color to: 1f313d
Now I'm going to head over to Layer -> Adjustment  Layer -> Gradient Map with those colors.
Now set it to overlay, and lower to opacity to your liking, mine is at 40%. Now it made my wings too blue, so I'm going to place this layer just UNDER my wings:




Now I want this to come out a bit more surreal looking, so I'm going to make the colors even brighter, and making it slightly hazy. First off, make a new layer ON TOP of all the other layers and adjustments.

Then click on Image -> Apply Image.
Set the blending to Normal, and make sure the 'Layer' is set to Merge before clicking okay.

Now all that did is set a flattened version of the image in that layer.
Next go to Filter -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur

Find a radius that's not -too- blurry, I'm going with 1.5 pixels.

Result:


Now set that layer to either Overlay/Soft Light. I say either because depending on the image, this could make it REALLY dark. I'm gonna stick with Overlay at 70% opacity:





Finally-ish, I'm going to try and bring back a bit of the highlight that was lost from her corset in all of this darkening. I'm going to create a new layer just above that blue gradient map, and fill (CTRL+F5) it with white.

Then I'm going to set that layer to Soft Light at 35% Opacity:




Finally I added some text in the lower corner:
Font: Brankovic 36Pt
Outer Glow: 152c4b, 100% Screen




And.. that's about it, here's my final:






If you have any questions, comments, concerns, just let me now; and as always, guests, feel free to register, it makes my day.

/End gratuitous use of commas.


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