Many designers will frown upon this because it's plainly not professional but in my opinion, I have produced some pretty spectacular results in a very short time using my own personal methods. Many people say you should cut out an image by using the lasso tool and zooming in 1600% erasing the rebel pixels!



IMAGE: I'll be using Marv from Sin City.

I'll be using just some random background that looks like this. I just cropped that from some image...



Now... we are going to create this.



To do this, we copy the initial Marv picture from google. Open it in a new window and go to Image->Adjustments->Desaturate.

Now that it is black and white, it will be easier to work with any color background, mine is a tan color.

Once we have it black and white use the Rectangular Marquee Tool to just select the portion of the image we want, I got a nice small square above his belt. Now that we have the actual image we're working with, keep it big, big is good, we do the normally very time consuming part. Although it is not the best way to go about this, I find it very quick and it produces very nice results.

Take the erasor tool, make sure the image is in 100%, I used the erasor tool on the air brush mode, not the solid mode, at about 70px and I started knocking away the big chunks. Once I had the small spaces to deal with and the spaces closer to his body, I knock it down to a relative position, in a real tight space that's surrounded by parts I want to keep, I might get as small as 2-3, otherwise I stay at around 10-20, and I finish it off.

Now we have Marv all cleaned up. Save him if you want. Now what I did was open up the background layer and just paste marve on there. Sorry folks, I forgot the size I scaled him down to, it was around 40% maybe but go into edit->transform->scale on the Marv layer and put where it says W: and H:, put 40% and 40% or something that fits and looks nice, click the check mark to apply your changes and let us proceed.

Now we have a background (change the colors of you want, to do so, click on the background layer and hit CTRL+U, colorize and mess with the saturation, hue, lighting to optimize it).

Let's blend old Marvy boy so he still looks WHOLE, not transparent like most tutorials have him. I just want him to have spots of color so it looks like he's blending with the background, not so he looks see through. IF you want him see through you will have to modify my layer styles to suit your needs.

I'm sure there are different ways of handling different pictures, this specific picture I fiddled with opacities and layer styles to suit my needs and most pictures will be similar. It really depends on how much contrast and the level settings of the picture you're using.

So here's what I did on the Marv layer:
Copy it twice so you have 3 total;
The bottom Marv layer should be on Overlay mode, 100% opacity, 100% fill;
Middle Marv layer should be on Color Burn, 100% opacity, 100% fill;
The top layer should be on Luminosity mode, 100% opacity, 100% fill.

Adjust the opacities to suit your needs, I thought this selection had a real nice FULL feel to it while the colors on his trench coat really match the background well, like there is the tannish aura about him filling the background or visa versa hell if I really care, it looks nice.

We can't have a signature without text now can't we, I just typed the word marv with Arial, lowercase, bold, size 28 on the bottom right hand corner. I then went into the layer format settings and click Outer Glow. Outer glow should look like this: Everything default except for Blend Mode: Normal, Opacity: 100%, and I used the solid color #776F48. Now click OK, OK, and get back to editing the pic. Click on the text layer and on the layers box make the Fill Opacity 0%! That's kind of crucial. Now duplicate the layer and click on the bottom layer. Go to Filter->Blur->Motion Blur->90 degrees at an intensity of 14. There you go a pretty sig with a nice cropped and blended picture. You receive an A+.

If you guys use different pictures/backgrounds colors or anything different I would love it if you guys would (even if it's the same i would like it) show me your outcomes and tell me if this tutorial was helpful. Thanks for reading!!!

I also used him on my Dille-Zone logo at www.ruremodeling.com/header4.jpg hehe. Great pic, it is.

well thanks, that tutorial works and looks nice too.

here;s what i made


its my first try.

i use adobe photoshop cs 8.0.

you said even if it is the same you wanted it so here you are

and yes this help me out soooooooooooooooooooooo much, thx a lot