This tutorial might seem a little gross! But it is meant to show how big a realism you can achieve with Photoshop. Thanks to oneactor10 for the beautiful picture of his daughter Desiree, it's almost a shame turning her into such a sad character...
Before lesson, click to enlarge After Lesson, click to enlarge


figure 1 ![]() | Step 1. First of all you need to download | Step 2. Activate Layer 1, by clicking once on the layer in the layers panel. Rename the layer to texture rust (or don't, its not a must). Now, press the button where the red arrow is pointing (figure 2a) to add a layer mask. Click once on the layer mask to activate it. Choose the brush tool, pick a soft brush of 100px. and start painting with black to erase the area as shown on figure 2. | Help to the novice: figure 2a |
Step 3. Here comes the trick! Change the blending mode of the texture rust layer to soft light, see where the red arrow points on figure 3a. Your picture should now look like figure 3. Point you mouse on figure 3, to see a close up of the result so far. Now you have yourself a pretty realistic wound, see :-) but we are not finished yet! | figure 3a ![]() |
figure 4 ![]() | Step 4. Open texture-beach.jpg. Desaturate the image by pressing Ctrl+U and turn the slider of Saturation down to -100 (figure 4a) press OK. Now, do the same thing with the beach image as you did with the rust image, from step 1 to step 3: Cut & paste, place on top of her face, add mask, change blending mode to soft light etc. Rename the layer to texture beach. Turn opacity of texture beach down to 30% in the layer panel. | Help to the novice: figure 4a |
figure 5 ![]() | Step 5. | Help to the novice: When you dodge you add light to an area, when you burn you darken the area instead. You can dodge and burn either the highlights the midtones or the shadows, with different exposure. figure 5a |

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