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This image is an example of one of my favorite themes, that of blending a classical floral painting with a portrait. I made two versions of this image. In the first version, I used two different floral paintings: the first to blend with the face to unify the woman and flowers, as if her soul now occupies the flowers and the second to provide a floral background, but one in which the flowers appear to be decaying, like flowers left on a grave site. In the second version, I used a simple black background.
I started with this photo from Pixabay, a source of copyright-free images. I love the beautiful shape of her face and neck.
Sometimes my starting images are muddy, noisy or grainy. So I generally start by preparing my images. In iColorama, I applied Adjust/Tonelab preset 4 for clarity. I used Effect/Denoise presets 2 and 3, as well as Effect/Glow preset 1 at low opacity and Style/Flow preset 1 at medium opacity, to smooth away the graininess in the image. To retain a bit of sharpness, I used Effect/Sharpen preset 3.
I will blend the photo of the woman with this photo from the Rijksmuseum website, which provides high-resolution images free to use and modify for any purpose, in their Rijksstudio.
In iColorama, I used Effect/Blend to blend the flowers on top of the woman, using Soft Light blending mode. In Effect/Blend, I generally try several different blending modes and slider settings, including the sliders under Set.
Often a fair amount of cleanup is needed after a blending step. Here I used Adjust/Levels to improve contrast, Adjust/High preset 1 at low to medium opacity to enhance highlights and sharpness, and Effect/Sharpen preset 3 for a bit more sharpness. Next, since the blending step clouded the woman's features, I again used Effect/Blend, this time to blend the image of the woman at medium opacity on top of the composite image, and using an inverted brush mask to blend back only the eyes and lips. Now remove the brush mask.
Now I want to get rid of the distracting bunch of leaves under the woman's chin. The way I will do it is to blend the image with itself, so that I can replace the offending leaves with black that matches the image background in tone and texture. So I again used Effect/Blend to blend the woman onto the composite image. I pressed the Flip X button to horizontally flip the image, and used my fingers to reposition the top layer so that black was covering the left lower leaf of the bottom image. Then I used an inverted brush mask to paint away the leaf.
Now I used Form/Crop to crop off the extra space on the right side of the canvas.
I used Tone/Enhance preset 2 at low opacity to remove the yellow color cast. I used Style/Coherence and a bit of Style/Flow to smooth the image, as there can be rough edges after a blend, particularly if you use the sliders under Set. Because these smoothing steps can result in too much softness in the edges, I will correct that by applying Effect/Sharpen preset 3 for subtle sharpening, and Effect/Raise preset 2 at low opacity for a bit more emphasis of the edges. Call this image A.
Now to provide a bit of background to the image, I will use this Rijksmuseum image.
To prepare the image for blending, I applied Style/Coherence preset 1 at medium opacity. Call this Image B.
Now, using Effect/Blend, I blended the Rijksmuseum image on top of the composite image, using Soft Light blending mode. I tried several different blending modes and slider settings, including the sliders under Set.
These were the settings I used in Soft Light blending mode. The use of the gray slider under Set generates the cutaway effect, so that the flowers appear eaten away or decaying, like flowers left on a grave site.
Before applying the blend in the previous step, I used a brush mask to paint away show-through effects of the top image from the main blooms of the bottom image.
Leaving the brush in place, I used Adjust/Levels to increase the brightness of the background.
With the brush mask still in place, I applied Style/Flow preset 1 at low opacity to the background to smooth the jagged edges that resulted from the use of the Set sliders in the blend step.
Now I will make another version. Using Effect/Blend, I blended the same images as before, namely image A on bottom and image B on top, but with different settings in the blend step.
These are the settings I used in Effect/Blend in Multiply mode.
Now, as before, I want to clean up after the blend step. I used Adjust/Tone lab preset 4 at very low opacity to improve clarity. Then I used Adjust/Tonelab preset 1 at very low opacity to slightly brighten the image without losing contrast. I used Tone/Enhance preset 2 at very low opacity to remove a slight color cast. Finally, I applied Effect/Sharpen preset 3 at low to medium radius for a bit more sharpness.
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