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One of my favorite treatments is the "torn" look. This is done by first painting some broad dark opaque strokes over a blank white canvas, and then choosing an interesting image to distort over those strokes in iColorama's Effect/Distort. I show you some examples here.
I started 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 cropped as much of the frame away as I could. Then I used Form/Warp to drag the remaining parts of the frame off the canvas. I continued to use Form/Warp to transform the shape of the woman into one what seemed to me livelier and more interesting. Then I smoothed using Style/Coherence and Style/Flow, and I used Adjust/Tonelab preset 4 as well as Tone/Enhance for depth and color, and Adjust/High for highlights and sharpness.
Next we will do the lion's share of the work. A quick summary of what we will do: 1. Create a blank canvas. 2. Paint some broad dark strokes on the blank canvas. 3. Use Effect/Distort to distort the woman over the strokes.
To create a blank white canvas, I used Adjust/Exposure and pulled the brightness slider all the way to one side.
To paint broad strokes on the blank canvas, I used Brush/Colorize and selected the Glassed Edges preset. I painted broad thick purple strokes across the canvas. I didn't save the image with just the purple strokes, but you can get the idea from looking at this image. It doesn't matter what color you pick for the strokes, because we will be distorting over them in Normal mode (it would matter in some of the other modes), but I think it's best if the strokes are a dark opaque color. For a brush I chose a plain circle with hard edges. Because I was using the Glassed Edges preset, the edges have a little bit of roughness to them, which adds later to the effect of torn paper.
Now, to distort the woman over the strokes, with the purple and white canvas open, I used Effect/Distort, and touched the Photo icon at the bottom right of the screen, and selected the image of the lady from my camera roll. I experimented with the Set sliders and the Distortion slider and used my finger to resize the lady image and move her around over the purple strokes until I got something I was happy with. It's worth noting that before I arrived at these purple strokes, I had earlier tried many other brushes and sizes and spacing of the strokes before I found this one, which had the distort effect I was looking for.
Here is another of my results using Effect/Distort with the same lady and the same purple strokes, so you can get a sense of the different looks that are possible with the same image and the same underlying brush strokes.
Here is my final image, after finishing touches in iColorama for tone and color.
Here is another purple and white single brush stroke I made the same way as I described above.
I won't show you all the other processing I did on this second example, but here is an image I created using Effect/Distory through that brush stroke and using the same lovely lady. I did adjustments for tone and color on my torn ladies to polish them off.
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