In this Photoshop breakdown, watch as Dean Samed walks you through his process and layers, to show you how he created this synthetic lifeform art.
As the tutorial starts, Samed explains this piece was created for one of his commercial book cover client commissions. With that, he begins to show us a few things he does for every commission. One of them is creating a folder within his layers panel that holds all the images and pieces that he thinks he might need to create his composite. Another thing he always does is create a folder of the masks he will be using in the building of the image. This makes erasing certain parts, very easy and efficient. Samed is full of these little tips that can make your workflow that little bit quicker. And there are plenty more as the video moves along.
Once the meat of the tutorial gets going, we see the original stock image used and how Samed started to build up the lines of the robot look on the model's face. All this is done with the pen tool, and I do not think that you would get any better results with a different tool. The pen tool is king for tasks like this. To add more depth to the lines, Samed then shows us how to add highlights. And as with any image, it is the highlights that give us the sense of depth on an otherwise flat looking line. I advise anyone who is getting into composite or photo-manipulation, to learn how to create depth with highlights and shadows. It is very important. If you want to see the full breakdown of the image, be sure to watch all of the video.
This video walkthrough is great for anyone wanting to learn how the pieces of a large photo-manipulation like this come together. Samed is renowned for his book covers so you are in safe and knowledgeable hands.
