Macabre Photo Manipulation
Mario Madjarov is an architecture student with a great passion for design and creative work.
A lot of his works can be found at his deviantART page.
In this photoshop tutorial we're going to learn to use various photo manipulation techniques to achieve a macabre effect. It's not really a big thing but I'll guide you through it and show you the basics which I believe you'll find very helpful :)
First we need a good stock image. For this tutorial, I'm going to use the image below.
Since we got our stock image, we can begin with our journey.
First of all we'll need to add some murkness in various parts of the object, to do that we'll need to use the burn tool which is one of the basic tools for this kind of photo manipulation.
For example I'll start with the hair, so grab the burn tool, change the brush style to soft rounded brush at brush size: 100 pixels. Don't forget to set the foreground color to default (black) too.
After we're done with the hair we're going to work on the face a bit, using the burn tool again. This time reduce the brush size to 45 pixels so we can make more detailed effects and use it mainly on those parts of the object where the shadow falls.
Now that we're finished with the burn tool, we'll focus on the eyes a bit more. Here we're going to remove the pupil from the left eye and stamp the right one with a metal grid. In this case we're going to use the smudge tool. so get the smudge tool and set the brush size to 17 pixels, and simply drag from the whiteness around the pupil and into the pupil part of the eye. Repeat this step several times until you reach the effect.
As we already mentioned, we'll use a metal grid to stamp the right eye. For this kind of technique essentially we'll need a texture with a metal grid. So we'll use this texture right here.
When we have our texture, just copy one of the squared metal grids in the center and paste it to the image where we're working on. After we've done that, rotate the layer a bit left so it can fit up stricly over the eye. Now add a layer mask and grab the brush tool, set the brush size to 35 pixels and use it to shape the layer into an eye. for the end change the blending mode of the layer to overlay and simply duplicate the layer for a more accented effect.
After the metal grid has been applied to the other eye, it's time to add some scars, mainly on the left part of the object including the rounded parts of the right eye.
Copy, paste the texture over the image and rotate it a bit right so the basic central line to lay down on the right arcade of the object. After that, change the blending mode of the layer to color burn and duplicate the layer.
It wouldn't be true macabre if we didn't create some bleeding holes. Let's proceed.
