This tutorial shows you how to overlay a simple texture image onto a photograph and using layer masks along with the Burn and Dodge tools make a texture appear to contour and distress the original photo to obtain this creepy effect.
I started out with a celebrity photo duplicated the original image to a new layer by selecting the layer and dragging it onto the new layer icon. I did this to preserve the original image but it is not a mandatory step in this process. I will mention layer duplication later in this tutorial and this is the method I prefer.
I then placed an image I found of peeling paint into the image using the PLACE command. The PLACE command inserts an image into your file as a SMART OBJECT instead of a rasterized image. The benefit of a SMART OBJECT is that no matter how much you move or resize the SMART OBJECT, the total number of pixels in the original image is retained. This allows you to experiment until you are satisfied with the size and placement of the SMART OBJECT without damaging the original. Here is the peeling paint image placed as a SMART OBJECT.
I changed the Layer Blend Mode to Multiply for the SMART OBJECT and now you can see thru the White areas of the image as it blends over the face. I moved and resized the SMART OBJECT to get the pattern in the location and size I desired.
I added a layer mask on the SMART OBJECT and began painting with a soft black brush to hide the Peeling Paint image to only be visible over the facial areas I wanted to see. In this Image I selected the BACKSLASH key while working in the mask and it shows me a quick mask in Red to reveal the areas I have masked out. This is an effective way to double check and see if you have missed some small areas that might have been missed. [One thing to keep in mind when dealing with a mask and a SMART OBJECT is that Adobe has not allowed the maks to be chained to the SMART OBJECT so it is very difficult to move the image and it's layer mask together. You can Rasterize the Layer and click between the Mask and Layer Image to Chain these together so that layer and mask move as one.]
This image shows the layer mask with the quick mask turned off and you can see that I have masked out the hair, eyebrows, eyes, mouth and some other areas. In order to add to the depth effect, I dropped the opacity of my soft black brush to 50% and began to lightly go over areas near the eyes, and on the ears and neat the edges where I wanted the Peeling Paint to fade and recede into the background to match the natural features of the face. I continued to drop the opacity of the black brush to add and remove detail and fine tune the results.
I then dropped back to my duplicated original image and started working with the Burn Tool set to Midtones and Varied Exposure between 15-25%. I added shadows to areas I wanted to appear more recessed like the eye sockets, the nose and mouth. I also darkened the ears so they receded into the background. I used the Dodge tool around the perimeters of the eyes and down the nose to increase the contrast adjacent the Burned areas and help accentuate the depth of the image. These steps added some grunge to increase the feel of the image. It's all just a taste thing. I tend to work till someone in the family walks by and is grossed out.
Looking over some areas I decided I wanted some more sublet detail. I duplicated the SMART OBJECT Peeling Paint layer and lowered the opacity of this duplicated layer to 17%. I then got a soft white brush and began revealing some of the areas masked to provide a softer set of lines to areas on the ears and nose. The difference is a little hard to see in this reduced tutorial capture, but remember to play with stacking your layers and even experiment with Opacity, Fill and Blend modes for the duplicated layers to get different effects when stacked.
To finish the Image, I added some text, flattened and downsized the image from 1920 pixels wide to 1024 pixels wide and then as the last step, I ran unsharp mask with the following settings to restore image sharpness.
The finished image result once again.
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