Stylish Surreal Portrait

Stylish Surreal Portrait
Stylish Surreal Portrait

In today's tutorial we will combine surrealism and fashion effortlessly to create a state of art portrait. I'll show you how to achieve this essentially through a combination of photos, filters and brushes. You can then translate these techniques into your designs to add an artistic edge to them!


Preview of Final Results


stylish-portrait

Stylish Surreal Portrait Photoshop Tutorial


Tutorial Details

  • Program: Photoshop Cs3
  • Difficulty: Beginner/Intermediate
  • Estimated Completion Time: 1 hour +

Resources


Step 1 - Brainstorm

I love the concept behind surrealism. Surrealism is a style of art that uses visual imagery from the subconscious mind to create art without the intention of logical comprehensibility.- Surrealism.com. Let's not limit our creativity to logic and let's design a portrait that will be a fusion of spunk, futuristic and Victorian!

Gather some inspiration to get your creative juices started. For this type of design I find it best to put my idea to paper before going into Photoshop to create the artwork. Right now it's just a rough sketch to help you visualize your concept. It doesn't matter if the end result is far from your original sketch. I drew a head overflowing with flowers and butterflies.

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Step 2 - Set up

Create an A4 size canvas with a decent print quality of 200dpi (optimal is 300dpi). Let's start off by working on the woman to give her a fashionable look. Open the woman image and place it at the center, bottom of the page.

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Step 3

Duplicate the woman image and apply a Black & White adjustment ( Image > Adjustments > Black & White) on it. Adjust the values for the different colors until you get a sharp black & white image with high contrasts. In a fashion portrait, the focus is usually on the woman's eyes and hair. Additionally I want her face contours to be more defined as I'm planning to extract her face from the image later.

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Step 4

Make a second copy of the woman's image and apply a Poster Edges Filter (Filter > Artistic > Poster Edges) with a maximum edge thickness of 10 and the bring the rest of the settings to 0. This gives us a highly stylized image and a beautiful glowing skin.

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Step 5

The “poster edge” layer should be on top of the “black & white” and it's Opacity should be set to 90%.

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3 comments on “Stylish Surreal Portrait”

  1. Thanks for this. I took my own model shot and worked my way through the tutorial. Great fun. Learnt a lot.

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