Skull Manipulation in Photoshop Tutorial

In this tutorial we are going to take a normal face and turn it into an undead cyborg! First we need a good face to work with, I found this one on http://www.sxc.hu/

Next we need a good skull, you can use the one I found below.

Copy both images onto your canvas. Next we need to position our skull in line with our man's face. To do this, reduce, the opacity of your skull layer and rotate/transform it accordingly. When you have found a good spot for it, bring the opacity back up to 100%, and place the skull layer below your face layer.

Now that our skull is in line, and below our face, we need to delete some parts of the face to reveal the skull below. Take out of pen tool, and make a selection similar to mine. Once you have a nice area selection, right click and choose "make selection" and enter a value of 0px.

Once you have your area selection, press delete to reveal the skull below.

Create a new layer in between your skull and face layers, we are going to create a dropshadow. Ctrl+Click your face layer to get a selection, and fill you selection with black. De-select, and choose Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur. You should have something similar to mine. Depending on where you want your light coming from, you can move your shadow slightly. For example, I moved it a few pixels downward and to the right.

Ctrl+Click your face layer again to get a selection. Contract your selection by 4 pixels by choosing Select > Contract and entering a value of 4. Inverse your selection by choose Select > Inverse. You should now how a selection similar to mine.

What we are going to do is lighten and darken the borders of our opening to give it some depth. To idea is to lighten portions to the south-east, and darken portions to the north-west. For example, I took my polygon tool and delete the enter right/bottom portion of my selection, as seen below, and then darkened the selection by choosing Image > Adjust > Brightness contrast.

Repeat this process, but this time deselect the portion that your darkened earlier, and lighten your selection. You should have something similar to mine.

Next I used my paintbrush tool to fill in the blank spots in my skull layer with black. You can see that inside the eye socket and to the right of the teeth there are brown areas where the background are showing though, fill these with black and darken the areas a bit with the dodge tool.

Next I merged my layers by choosing Layer > Flatten Image. I then desaturated my image a bit by choosing Image > Adjust > Hue Saturation, and moving the saturation bar to the left. Next a create a new color layer, and colored my eye red. Finally I added a small lens flare with the Filter > Render > Lens Flare filter in my eye.

Add some borders and add your text and your finished! Here is how mine turned out.