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This is a blend of a boy's face with an urban scene. It gives a feeling of the boy thinking back nostalgically on days spent in the big city. In a blend like this, it's important to reduce detail in the images being blended so as to be able to call attention to those components of the image that hold the emotion to be conveyed, in this case the sideways glance of the eyes.
I started with this photo of my nephew Eric taken by Mom many years ago.
In iColorama, I applied Adjust/Tonelab preset 4 for clarit and depth, Style/Coherence for smoothness, and Tone/Enhance for color.
I used this photo from Pixabay, a source of copyright-free images.
I used Effect/Blur preset 11, which creates these interesting hatch-like blurs, that lend some abstract simplification to the urban scene while still retaining some sharpness and recognizability.
Now, in Effect/Blend, I blended the cityscape on top of Eric in Overlay blending mode, trying different settings for all the sliders including the Lightness and Gray sliders under Set. Those Set sliders are what enabled me to have the top of Eric's head take on the shape of the skyline.
Now I used Adjust/Tonelab preset 4 for clarity and depth.
The eyes are getting lost in the blend. I want to brighten them and give them catchlights. I brightened the eyes by using the exposure slider in Adjust/Exposure and using an inverted brush mask to paint in the effect only on the eyes. With the mask still in place, I applied Adjust/Levels to deepen the black of the eyes. Then I removed the mask, and this time I lightened only the right eye, again using an inverted brush mask, and again kept the mask in place and used Adjust/Levels to deepen the black. Then I removed the mask, and with a very small brush, cloned the highlight from the left eye to the right eye using Paint/Clone. Then once I again I increased exposure in Adjust/Exposure, and using an inverted brush mask, I used a very small brush to confine the effect only to the highlights in the eyes.
The ears are very bright and drawing the eye. So I reduced exposure using Adjust/Exposure, and using a brush mask, I confined the effect only to the ears.
Finally, I applied a bit of Effect/Raise 2 for definition.
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