Learn how to create this freezing cold manipulation with Photoshop! You'll learn how to work with difference ice and crystal photos and complete the look with a cold blue photo effect.

Preview of Final Results

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Frozen.zip | 6.63 MB

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Freezing Cold Portrait Photo Manipulation Photoshop Tutorial

Resources

• Background - sxc.hu
• Girl - sxc.hu
• Frost Texture - sxc.hu
• Icicles - sxc.hu
• Snowflakes - sxc.hu
• Crystal - enchantedgal

Step 1

Create a new document in Photoshop. It should be around 11 inches wide by 17 inches long and with a depth resolution of 300dpi.

Step 2

Drag to your document the background frozen road stock image and resize it to fill all the canvas by dragging the anchor points to fit the whole image:

Step 3

The background looks too bright at the moment and we need to change that in order to create a gloomy dark night mood. Open up the levels menu (Image > Adjustments > Levels or Ctrl+L) and apply the settings as shown below:

Step 4

Use the Brightness/Contrast tool (Image > Adjustments > Brightness/Contrast) and set the Brightness value to 75 and Contrast to 90

Step 5

Since we made some changes to the lighting of the background, the colors got a bit too saturated. To fix this, use the Hue/Saturation tool (Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation or Ctrl+U) to lower the saturation to –45.

Here’s how your background should look.

Step 6

Now we’re going to blur the background to add some depth to the overall image and ensure it doesn’t upstage the rest of the photo manipulation. Apply a Gaussian Blur (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur) with a radius of 8 pixels.

Here’s how the background should look now.

Step 7

In this step, we’re going to set our adjustment layers so that we can work under them and create a moody feel to our composition. Start by selecting all the adjustment layers in the Layers palette then place them all into a new layer group (Ctrl+G). Name this group “Adjustments”. Next, add a Gradient Map fill layer (Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Gradient Map). Click on the Gradient to bring up the Gradient editor.

Create a gradient like shown below. To create this gradient, click on the bottom left stop then change the color to black (#000000) then click OK. Click on the bottom right stop then set the color to #032871 then click OK and OK again to exit out of the Gradient Editor.