How to Make a Fairy Collage

In this Adobe Photoshop tutorial you will see how to make a little girl into a fairy princess with tender butterfly wings.

1. First of all I cut out the image of the girl out of its original background. (the selection process is covered here). Then I found a more or less suitable flower background image . It needed some preparation - I had to make sure it is the same resolution as the girl picture and has appropriate size.

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2. The next step was to paste the selected image into the new background (a new layer is automatically created by Adobe PhotoShop).

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3. Then I used edit>transform>rotate command to create a flight effect and the Move tool to find a good position.

4 Then I used Crop to cut away extra background spaces. I also had to crop to the legs, as they were not in the picture originally).

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5.I cut out a butterfly wing from a photo to make the fairy wings.

6. The left wing was put onto a new layer. I used Free transform on it to properly position the wing behind the girl's back and make it look natural (to create the effect of flying).

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7. To add the right wing I pasted in the same wing selection the second time, flipped it horizontally, used Free transform. The wings should look natural enough.

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Then I merged the two layers containing the wings,

8. The next step was to make the shadow fall from the girl. I duplicated the layer with the girl and applyed image>adjust>threshhold (to maximum) to it.

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9. Staying in the same layer I used filter>gaussian blur (adjust the amount, looking at the shadows in the background image).

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10. Then I created the wings shadows in the same manner.

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11. The girl's shadow is partly falling on the background flower and partly - on the wings. These parts are differently distanced from the viewer. So, using a rectangular marquee, I shifted the appropriate parts of the girl's shadow.

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12. Out of the butterfly picture I took the antenna, pasted two copies of it onto new layers, flipped one of the copies horizontally and placed the antennas onto the girl's head. To make a better transition between the antennas and the hair I used a soft edge erazer.

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13. At this time I merged all layers except the bacground layer.

14. Then copied the resulted layer and applied gaussian blur to it.

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15. Here I changed layer blending mode to Multiply instead of Normal and put Opacity to 60%.

16. Layer>merge down.

17. Finally I used curves and levels to adjust the color in the girl image to the background.

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To make it look softer I also used a Warming (LBA) photo filter.

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18. The last step was to merge all layers and save the collage with needed resolution and size.

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When I showed the result to my daughter (who is the model), she was very excited about it but wanted to see something else. So we played a little bit with different filters and tools. Here's the one effect she liked especially - the use of Art History brush on the parts of the background.

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