Repurposing an old master - Photoshop Tutorial

Okay in this movie we are going to take an old master and we're going to take one of my cats and we're going to make this composite. It's going to bring up some interesting stuff along the way. So let's come to the cat image with the move tool, drag it onto the tab of the other image. Because we want to transform the cat's face and we want to do it non-destructively. Convert it to a smart object. I'll now turn that off. We'll come to the background layer with my quick selection tool. I'll make a selection of the face. I'll refine that in this case with the lasso tool. Holding down the shift key and just adding in the back of the neck and this portion of the eye. I'll refine it a little bit further going to select a mask. We'll turn up the smoothing and I'll add in a little bit of feathering as well. Output that to a selection. I'll now turn back on the cat layer and use this selection as a layer mask for the cat layer. Now, typically, when you have a layer and a layer mask and you want the chain to connect them so that if you transform or move one, the other goes along with it. But in this case, I want to unlink the two so that I can transform the cat face within the selection shape. Command or Control T to put a transformation rectangle around the cat, but actually let me just escape out of that because I think it would be a good idea if I press five to go to a 50% transparency so that I can match up the features as much as possible. Now I'll command or control T to transform and I want to scale this, starting out scaling it proportionally and rotate it and position it. Fair bit of back and forth here to get as close as I can. All right, now I think at this point I want to switch to my warping options. I start out with a three by three grid and I need to be careful here. I don't want to distort it too much. So I'm going to start at the edges and move these Bezier control handles. I'm going to add in another column right there. And then pull that right side over a little bit. So, gently does it here and I think I'm close to being where I want to be. I'll commit to that by pressing return. Let's reset the transparency to 100%. Yeah, I think that's okay. Now I'll move to my layer mask, choose my brush tool, increase my brush size and I just need to soften this edge here and also restore the pearl earring of the painting's title. The detail here is all very murky in the original which is making it somewhat forgiving for us. Now I want to address the disparity in color and brightness. So clicked on to the cat layer I'll come to the filter and stylize and we'll add an oil paint filter. Experiment with these values but these are the ones that I ended up using. And then I'm going to follow that up with a neural filter. The neural filter that I'm going to use is color harmonization. I'll turn that on and I will select the layer, the background layer, that I will use to harmonize the cat layer too. And you can see how that's changed its color. I'm actually going to increase its strength up to 90. All right. One more option here and that's the output. I'm going to output this to a new layer rather than a smart filter just because at this moment in time there is a bit of a problem using this filter with a smart filter. Okay now all that remains to be done is to add the whiskers back in. I managed to chop off the whiskers on the left-hand side. I'll disable the layer mask, come and get my polygonal lasso tool and make a very rough selection of the whiskers, command or ctrl J to copy them to a new layer. We'll turn the layer mask back on. On the whiskers layer I'm going to convert it to black and white, command shift or Control-Shift-U and then I'm going to come and get my burn tool. Exposure all the way up and I'm going to paint over it with the intent of making everything except the whiskers black so that when we change the blending mode of this layer to screen the black areas will disappear. So I'll paint over this in black and then I'll change the range to the mid-tones and paint over it some more and we'll go back to the shadows and we'll paint over it some more. That's probably about as far as I can get with this technique. I'll now add a layer mask and come to my brush tool and paint in black to remove those smudgy areas. And then I can get in close and with a small brush just tidy up this edge here. So it might take a bit more work to get that exactly right but the technique is essentially make it into a screen blending mode and force everything but the detail that you want to retain to black.