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I love to take an unusual face and do something extreme with it, such as tearing away the skin to suggest an underlying structure in a hollow volume.
I started with this photo from Pixabay, a source of copyright-free images. I love this interesting face and have been waiting for an idea to use with it for a while now.
In iColorama, I applied a bit of Adjust/Tonelab preset 4, Style/Flow and Effect/Light.
I created this pattern while I was experimenting with blending a photo with a FraxHD image.
Here is the FraxHD image I had been using.
Here is a Pixabay photo processed in iColorama using Style/Flow, that I was blending with the above FraxHD image.
In Effect/Blend, I blended the pattern over the face. I made a lot of attempts using different blending modes and slider settings, including the Lightness and Gray sliders under Set, and here is the one I went with. The blend mode was one of the negative ones (difference, exclusion, negative). The Sliders got me partway there at exposing the lighted right side of her face, but I ended up using a brush mask to get the cutout I wanted, including making sure that her glasses frame, left eye, and neck shadow thrown by her right collar, were not covered by the pattern. I saved the brush mask in case I needed to use it again later.
I knew I wasn't done at this point but I needed to explore some ideas for what was missing. I played with a lot of ideas, but here is a preset under Form/Ray that I liked a lot.
A different preset in Style/Ray led me eventually to this image.
But after that little diversion, I went back to what I had been doing and attempted a blend of the Ray image and my previous stopping point. Here, I blended the face on top of the Ray image. I had to re-position the top layer so there was a good match. It helped to temporarily reduce opacity of the top layer so I can tell when the two layers match up. Then I put opacity back where I wanted it.
I explored a lot of different blending modes and settings and eventually ended up with something close to this.
Once again I blended back the image from my previous stopping point, bringing back the brush mask I had saved previously. This means that the new effect I am creating will be applied only to the right side of the face. As always, I tried lots of blending modes and settings.
Removing the brush mask, I cropped, applied Style/Flow or Style/Coherence, improved tone, vibrance and color, applied Effect/Light, and applied Effect/Raise.
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