Practice

I have been working and tweaking a picture of Jack Nicholson, my plan was to zombify him using textures, incorporating images of cuts and bruises and using the general tools that photoshop provided me with, to make him look just like a zombie would. I will not be using this for my final submission however this will be of great benefit to me with all the skills and tricks I can take away from this and because I spent a while doing this.

Here was the picture that I started with, this is obviously recognisable as Jack Nicholson. I like this photo of him because it is a head shot picture with all his face and stops at the neckline.
The first thing that I did was to find textures/pictures I wanted to incorporate into my picture. For the texture of the skin I went for a cracked earth style and I applied this to 3/4 of the face and not to one of the cheeks. For the raw meat picture I used a selection of it using the quick selection tool to pick out the part I wanted to use. I applied this around the right eye. Another picture I used (this was not used as a texture) was a this picture of some teeth with blood around them. Again using the selection tool I drew around the lip to just get the mouth area

On the layer with the original image, I changed the blending mode from normal to Darker Colour to make features look darker and more intensified and it was in the theme of darken the picture to make it look more eerie. I have used different layers so I was able to apply mode only to this player. I used different layers so I was allowed to do this, it meant that this effect only affected on layer and not the whole image. The cracked earth texture was also on a different layer and I changed the blend mode of this also from normal to a Soft Light because I didn't want the texture to be so sharp, it made it look more natural.
I have also changed the filter Liquify of the image, you may be able to notice a little I made the right under eye look more droopy and saggy and did  the same effect to the corner of the mouth. This gave his a more zombie like look. I also decided the change the blend of the image of the mouth and teeth to Difference because I played around using all of the different blends and found that this one was the best, it didn't look too fake like others did.

I have also used a number of layer to create the finishing image, I did this because I wanted to apply different effects to different aspects of the image without affecting the whole of the image so I created a number of layers, for example the differnet blend modes, like the blend mode for the image of the mouth, meat and of jack are all different.

I filtered the image and blurred this, the type of blur I used was the Gaussian Blur. I used the brush tool and used a combination of blacks and reds in the nostil, under the eye and around the mouth to make it look like bruises. The before and after below shows the difference.  

The first image is where I simply applied the texture and played around with the different blend modes to get the desired look. The second image I used the Gaussian Blur and the final picture I used a number of tools such as the Dodge Tool, Blur Tool, Smudge Tool, on the areas where the tools were needed.



FINAL PICTURE:                                       

I'm happy with the overall image and it looks how I wanted it to, my DVD cover will be quite similar to this.

 Sources:
Jack Nicholson picture: http://anacastrosix.buzznet.com/photos/closeupcelebritiesby/?id=68279863
Cracked earth: http://www.surrealpsd.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/crackedearth3small.jpg
Raw meat: http://www.pearshapedthoughts.com/2011/07/garnishing-raw-meat-i-need-you.html 
Bloody tooth: http://www.sonicyouth.com/gossip/showthread.php?p=1068887