Create an Awesome Floating Face Manipulation with Fiery Hair in Photoshop

In this tutorial, I will show you the steps I took to Create an Awesome Floating Face Manipulation with Fiery Hair in Photoshop. This is an intermediate level Photoshop tutorial and some steps can be a bit tricky, but why not have a try!

Along the way, I will show a nice technique of manipulating fire texture. I will also show you some basic retouching skills for your photo.

Here is a preview of the final effect I have for this tutorial: (click to enlarge)

PSD File Download

To complete this tutorial, you will need the following stocks:

Ground

Model

Fire

Attention: If you have difficulty with Step 4 of this tutorial, check out this video tutorial I have below:

Step 1

Create a new document sized 1280 * 800px with black background. Load the ground image into Photoshop and select a piece from the ground, copy and paste the selection onto the image, then perspective it as shown below:

Use a soft eraser to fade the top edge as shown below:

Add the following 3 adjustment layers on the ground layers:

Black and White

Levels

Layer mask on the levels adjustment layer:

Curves

and you will have the following effect so far:

Step 2

We will now add the face in – load the model image into Photoshop and select the face:

Copy and paste the selection into our document, use a small soft eraser to clean up the edge:

Then we want to erase part of her face with a soft eraser:

Step 3

Add the following 3 adjustment layers as clipping mask to this face layer:

Black and White

Levels

Curves

Layer mask on the curves adjustment layer:

and here is the effect so far:

Step 4

We can add some cloud behind and around the face area with the cloud filter or a cloud brush:

We will now add fire texture into the image – select a piece as shown below:

Warp this selection and aim to achieve this shape below:

Apply the following image adjustments to this fire texture layer:

and here is the effect so far:

Go to Filter > Distort > Twirl and apply the following settings:

Hit Ctrl + F and repeat this filter a few times, and you will have the following effect:

Duplicate this layer few times and merge them together, then duplicate the merge layers a few times and scatter them around the head:

Step 5

We’re almost done! For some final touches, I added some particles with this rain brush I created on the image:

I then added some fire particles by going back to the fire image and selecting parts of it, copy and paste the selection onto our image:

Hint: make sure you change the blending mode of these fire layers to “Screen”.

I then added some colours and adjusted the contrast a bit with the selective color adjustment layer and curves adjustment layer, and here is the final effect I have: (click to enlarge)

That’s it for this tutorial! Hope you enjoy it and find it useful! Till next time, have a great day!