Guy Fawkes - before and after

Here is the before and after of my "Guy Fawkes" image which can be seen here:


OK, so before I put up the before/after, I would like to say that I decided to include the crop I used in the picture as part of this because otherwise the comparison looks a bit weird.


(click for larger view)

As a very brief and quick "how to", I'll explain what I did.

Well, you can see the before pic - that's where it started (not including the initial crop). I first took it into photoshop as a RAW file and worked on things like white balance and exposure, highlights, lights, darks, and shadows. I then moved the pic from camera raw to photoshop's main part. Here, first flipped the image then I cloned the beard all the way up properly so it covered my whole jaw entirely. I then changed the colour of the hat by selecting only the hat and the area around it on a duplicate layer then going to "replace colour". Because I hadn't selected around the hat only, I had to then create a mask and paint back in the parts of my head and hair I needed. I then did the same for the jacket making it a little darker. Then I added a "painting texture" and set it to "multiply" as the blending mode and made a mask painting back in my own body so the texture remained only behind me. Then I messed further with curves, gradients, colour overlays and that sort of thing to get the tones exactly as they appear in the pic. I then applied a slight grunge texture on about 20-30% opacity. And lastly I applied a very small vignette and voila.

That's the most photoshop I've done on a single image in ages but I dont mind it. I like photoshop so its cool :)