Photoshop tutorial - turn woman into a vampire / witch

As a part of my Fantasy Art tutorials series (mostly posted at Lorelei Web Forum), following many requests, I decided to make a tutorial that will show you how to turn a woman into a vampire / witch. Well, only visually

Step 1 - starting… Take a photo of a girl you are going to work with. Traditionally I am using Becca’s photo, you can also avail of her free stock at DeviantArt.com. We will only be working with a face, hence we are using only the upper part of her photo.

Step 2 - smoothing the image. Let’s smooth the image. We want to avoid using blur settings, what we will do is just “smoothing” the photo, same effect as we used in Like in Magazines tutorial. Go to Filter >> Noise >> Reduce noise and apply the settings you see on the image. We will only use 5px noise reduction as we don’t want to smooth it too much.

Step 3 - removing black eyes. Our image had black areas under the eyes, which we want to remove prior to applying our own scary effects. Using the Healing Brush tool, Press “Alt” near the eye (where there is no dark area) and, using a brush with soft edge, about 30px, make a few “stamps” around the eyes, which will remove the dark parts. It will probably take a few times ’til you succeed to do it properly, if you see you are not managing, just skip this step. On the left side you can see the result after applying the healing brush.

Step 4 - removing redness. Photos rarely come in excellent colors, and here, for a vampire look, we most definitely need to add a bit coldness to the image’s colors before we start off with the main effects. Press Ctrl + L to go to Levels panel. Reduce the redness from your photo, by selecting the “red” channel and dragging the left arrow a bit rightwards.

Step 5 - The doodle part. Make a new layer (Shft + Ctrl + N) and select a brush tool, approximately 20px, or smaller (depends on your image, and just go over the hair of the girl, covering all that area, as shown on the illustration.

Step 6 - Merging settings, gray hair. As we don’t want the hair to be just black and look like a real kid’s doodle, while the upper (hair layer) is selected, change the layer’s blending options to “Color”, this way, you will get grey, old looking hair. While most tutorials on the internet show how to remove gray hair and make one look younger and better, I decided to show how to do it the other way around. So, hair is now gray. If you see that at some parts you missed with the brush, just remove it carefully with eraser tool.

Step 7 - make the face pale. There are quite a few techniques to make the face pale, however, we don’t want to add “defuse glow” and get an unevenly spread stains of white colour, we want our witch / vampire’s face to look bluish. So, same like we did in Step 5, make a new layer, take a small brush with blue hue, any of your choice, we used #406eb9, and go over the girl’s face without touching the eyes or the lips. Now, as we only want to add a hue, not a color, set the blue face layer’s blending options to Color Dodge, and reduce the opacity to about 65%, or less / more, depending on your image’s initial lightness.

Step 8 - Red lips. Any vampire should have beautiful red lips, so what we gonna do it, add a new layer, select a dark red (#af0512 is what we used) and cover the lips with your brush. Then, set the blending options to Multiply, to give it a deep effect, as we want the lips to be dark and stand out.

Step 9 - Making glassy eyes. Ok, a vampire, ghost, witch or whoever we are trying to create here, should have pale, glassy, dead-looking eyes. This effect is very easy to achieve. Select the initial layer with girls photo and choose the Dodge tool. Zoom on the eyes and use a small dodge tool brush to go over the area inside the eyeball. My dodge tool was set to 19% exposure, and i applied it a several times until I got the desired effect.
If you followed all the steps so far more or less precisely, you should get something like this by now. Of course your result could be looking different, because the initial photo might be of a different lightness or contrast. If you have any questions, please leave a comment bellow, I will try to get back to everyone who has a problem.

Step 10 - The atmosphere. Last step is creating the appropriate atmosphere, mainly by just changing the background. What I did here is just cropped the image using the magnetic lasso tool, and added a dark and somber image of a forest to the background. This step is also optional, as you may want to leave your current background or replace it with something different. My cropping as a bad example because it’s not very accurate, it was just for example purposes.

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial. If you wish to discuss the tutorial or post your work, please do it in my forum’s thread, dedicated to this tutorial.