A partially transparent women, lit as if from within, hovers on the glass-in porch of an abandoned house in a ghost town. She is surrounded by ghostly flowers that fill the house with an eerie glow visible from all the windows. Her skin is peeled away to reveal the flowers, showing her partially decomposed state, suggestive of a deathly presence of a former inmate of the house.
I created this in iColorama on a blank white canvas, by using a round shape mask and several different textures.
I opened the above image in the Dreamscope app, and I tried several filters, choosing this result.
I used this photo from Pixabay, a source of copyright-free images. I like her straightforward gaze and the simple composition.
I did some basic processing on her in iColorama.
Using Effect/Blend, I blended her onto the Dreamscope result. I used my fingers to position and resize her to get her where I wanted her, with her face showing through the bright center of the underlying image. I tried a lot of blending modes and slider positions, and used the gray slider in Set to blend her face but only part of her shoulders and hair. I thought the result was somewhat suggestive of her being a partially decomposed corpse, without actually being graphic. I masked out her background so that the Dreamscope image shows there. Then I smoothed things out with Style/Coherence and Style/Flow.
I used this scanned slide of a photo I took in Bodie ghost town many years ago.
In Effect/Blend in iColorama, I blended the house into the woman. I tried different blending modes and slider positions, and I chose a combination of blending mode and settings that leave her transparent enough to just sense the white plank wall behind her, so she would feel more like a ghost. I used the gray slider in Set to get the bottom image to leak through the windows on the right side of the image as well as filling the main window. I used a brush mask to clean up the windows. I decided to let part of the panes disappear into her hair rather than jail her entirely behind them. I brought back her eyes from the Dreamscope-blended image using Effect/Blend with an inverted brush mask. I did some smoothing with Style/Flow, some final sharpening in Effect/Sharpen, tone and color adjustments, and I used Adjust/Levels for a bit more contrast.