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This is one of my many images blending a woman with a flower. I want the woman to appear as if she is part of the flower, while keeping her integrity as a person. For these types of blends, it is best if both of the images to be blended have their subjects isolated against simple, preferably flat, backgrounds, and that both are rather simple compositions or simplified renderings.
I started with this photo from Pixabay, a source of copyright-free images. I thought her downcast face would work well with the lilacs I will blend her with.
I will use this photo from the Rijksmuseum website, which provides high-resolution images free to use and modify for any purpose, in their Rijksstudio. I will use this photo to blend with the woman.
In iColorama, in Effect/Blend, I blended the woman onto the lilacs. I tried several blending modes and slider settings, including the gray and lightness sliders under Set, which allowed me to drop out those parts of the woman image that fell outside of the lilac branch.
In Effects/Blend, using an inverted brush mask, I blended back portions of original lilac image, to cover areas that I wasn't happy with in the blend results.
Then again in Effect/Blend, using an inverted brush mask, I blended back portions of the features of the woman from the original image.
I cropped using Form/Crop. Then in Effect/Blend, I blended in a sky from a Rijksmuseum image to create a more interesting background. I tried several blending modes and slider positions to get the results I wanted.
This is the Rijksmuseum image I borrowed the sky from.
Here I used Form/Warp to stretch the subject to better fill the frame without overly distorting it.
I made some adjustments to tone. I used Tone/Duotone in Multiply mode at very low opacity to tone the shadows. I tweaked the color using Tone/Enhance at low opacity. And I used Adjust/Levels to improve the contrast.
There is still a bit of mess left from the blend, mostly in her face. I used Style/Coherence with an inverted brush mask to paint the smoothing effect on only those areas that needed it. Then I adjusted the opacity of the effect.
Finally I brought the image into the Metabrush app and used some Doodle brushes to add texture to the image.
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