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Texture here is the main ingredient. I chose use typewriter lettering as a texture, and to make it white on white, so that I had to rely on sharpness and a raised effect for visibility and detail, while keeping the image as smooth as possible.
I started with this photo from the Sktchy app. Sktchy photos are small, so I upsized her twice in BigPhoto.
In iColorama, I used Adjust/Tonelab preset 4 for tonal separation. You can see that the image is rough and grainy. But the processing steps I will use will almost completely rewrite the pixels, so the main thing is to have a big enough canvas for a good quality image.
I applied Style/Simplify, using one of the lower (larger number) presets, at medium opacity.
I opened the image in Metabrush. In Paint mode, on a new layer, I painted over her, using herself as Brush image, and painting with a using a large, medium opacity crtext 14/18 brush. After painting all over her in medium opacity, I made several full opacity strokes in the area of her face. In brush settings, I used maximum spacing, maximum position variance, medium rotation variance, and no structure or shadow.
In iColorama using Effect/Blend, I blended the Metabrush image over the woman. I tried several blending modes and slider settings. I used a brush mask to protect her eyes.
I applied Adjust/Tonelab preset 3 for some tonal separation and color.
To smooth out the roughness of the image, I applied Effect/Glow at low opacity, with a brush mask for the eyes.
Now I need to work on the eyes. Attention to the eyes can make a much stronger image. I used I used Adjust/Exposure to brighten the eyes, using an inverted brush mask to confine the effect to only her eyes. Keeping the mask in place, I applied Adjust/Levels to tweak the contrast of the eyes. Then, with the mask still in place, I applied Effect/Sharpen at low opacity to the eyes. I removed the mask. Then I applied Effect/Raise to the overall image, at low opacity, to bring out the letters a bit more. There is always a tension between smoothness and sharpness. On the one hand, you often want to get rid of noise, compression artifacts, graininess, and jagged aliased lines, that were either the result of the original image or its processing. On the other hand, you often want to retain detail in key features such as the eyes, and, when the texture is an important compositional element as it is here, in the texture. You see me, in my tutorials, constantly re-evaluating the balance between smoothness and detail.
I used Form/Warp to increase the space occupied by her head and bring more prominence to her face and features, while retaining enough of the hair to see the interesting fall-off of the letters as they fade into the darkness of the background.
The bright white of her blouse is too bright for the rest of the image, and it pulls your eye to the blouse. To tone down that brightness, I wanted to add some color to the blouse. I chose blue, because that color is already in the image, in the eyes. I used Preset/Gradient preset 1 with an inverted brush mask to paint her blouse blue. When you open your image in Preset/Gradient, you will see a white screen. Tap the Color button at the bottom right of your screen, and your image will appear. Now tap the color picker (white box) in the lower right of your screen, and choose a color. You will see the entire image become tinted with the color you selected. But Color mode does not work to apply color to a white object. So instead, I used Multiply mode. Since I want to apply the color only to the blouse, I used an inverted brush mask so I could paint the blue color only onto the blouse. You can reopen the color picker to fine tune the color, and you can use the Opacity slider to control the intensity of the effect.
I felt that the blue I used for her blouse was too bright and needed to be toned down. So I used Tone/B&W. I left the brush mask in place from the previous step, and inverted it. I used the Opacity slider to control how much black and white was needed to reduce the saturation in her blouse.
After removing the mask from the above step, I applied a slight overall blue tone to the image, using Preset/Gradient.
Now returning to her eyes, I used Brush/Clone to copy the catchlight from the right eye to the left eye. With Clone, simply drag part of the image to another part of the image. You'll usually need to make a few tries before you get exactly what you want. Fortunately, there's an Undo button on the left of the screen. Then, using Adjust/Exposure and an inverted brush mask, I lightened the whites of the eyes.
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