Brandon Beren

Raster self portrait Brandon Beren -

Straight self portrait (photo)

Process:
First, I copied the background to get an unlocked version of the original photo to work with. I wanted to go with a darker, little more morbid feel, so I first made a hue adjustment layer to bring down the saturation, checked colorize with a blue hue, and lowered the opacity.

I wanted to make it bluer around y left eye so I raised the opacity of the layer slightly and filled the entire mask with a mid-high gray shade and took a white brush to totally reveal the blue hue around the eye.

Next, I made another copy of the original photo and applied a Gaussian blur to the layer. I applied a layer ask completely full of white to reveal the layer and filled most of the face closer to the camera with white to hide the blurred part of the image to give it a macro look and feel.

Going on, I too the blurred layer and copied it as another layer, further blurred it and went into the liquefy tool to warp it around the eye. I then made a curves adjustment layer clipped to this layer to over expose it. I then painted over the eye in the layer mask of the blurred layer to only reveal certain parts of the image I wanted.

For the vignette high contrast look, I simply made a new layer, used a radial black and white gradient and set it to color burn at 44% opacity.

Last but not least... For the old photo scratches... I made a new layer, filled it with white, rendered using the fibers filter with low variance and high strength, made a selection of the black fibers with the magic wand, saved it as a layer mask, saved the layer mask in the channels palette, hid the selection, and hand painted with a brush in parts of the imaged over the eye mostly and randomly other places to give visual interest.

That's it. The reason I made the portrait like this is because I recently, before the semester, went blind in m left eye. Its mostly better now, but I'm stuck with 20/70 vision for the rest of my life in the eye... Better then worst than 20/200 though.