Creating an Evil Look in Photoshop
It's the season for horror movies and scary things. Something about the cold weather keeps us pent up inside and opens the doors to find some scary entertainment. This tutorial will show you how to create a dark and evil look from an ordinary photograph using Adobe Photoshop. It's really a lot of fun to set a dark mood to an image using the various effect and techniques that apply to Photoshop. Creating the evil look is an involved process but once you get the hang of the flow, things will become a lot easier.
We will begin with a head shot photograph of your's truly in a menacing pose. This photo doesn't have much of an evil or dark quality yet but when said and done it should present us with a fairly good result. Feel free to use your own snapshots in this tutorial. Settings don't have to match exactly, this kind of work is more about finding your own artistic abilities and using your good judgment. I came up with this tutorial on the fly and I think it's a good example of how you can apply your imagination with the proper tools.
The first step is to extract the subject from this obviously non scary looking background. To do this you will need to turn the background layer into a non-locked layer by simply double clicking the layer in the layers palette. Next you will want to create a new layer and use the fill tool to paint in a color that contrasts well with the subject. Red or green is a good choice for most situations. Take the new color filled layer and place it under the photo layer. Now with the photo layer selected, create a layer mask by clicking on the "add layer mask" icon in the layers palette. Your layer palette should look something like the image here.
Now we begin erasing the background from the picture by painting in the parts we want to erase using a black brush on the mask layer. This is a good way to extract an image because we can bring back parts of the image that we want by painting the mask with a white brush, this prevents us from making mistakes that can't be undone. You will want to begin with a large brush to get the bigger parts of the background and move down to smaller brushes for more detailed work. It's good to use a medium soft brush for this to prevent too hard of edges.
Working around the hair can be difficult, you might want to lower the flow or opacity of your brush around the edges to improve the blending. If you're feeling artistic enough you can actually draw in the hair but that is beyond the scope of this tutorial.
When we are done masking, the beginnings of the evil image should look something like this.
Now that we have the hard part out of the way we can now turn our attention to the fun stuff. It's time to add a background. I chose a picture of some vines growing along the fence line which i converted to grayscale using the camera raw editor in photoshop. I chose the vines because we can get a natural evil feel from wooded scenes. You will want to create a new layer above the color filled background layer and below the layer with the face on it. Paste the background photo or artwork on this new layer. You may want to scale the new background image until it fits well with the composition. Our image should now resemble this. Still not dark and menacing yet but we'll get there.
Something's just not quite right with the picture. We need to give the composition some depth. With the new background layer selected go to [filter-blur-gaussian blur], increase the radius until you have a good illusion of distance.
We all know that evil things don't tend to have fleshy colors so it's time to make some adjustments. We only want the adjustment to apply to the face layer so with the face layer selected go to [select-load selection] and the mask we created should be in the dialog box, hit ok and you will see the selection. With the face layer still selected you will want to create a new "hue/saturation" adjustment layer by clicking the "adjustment layer" icon in the layer palette. Bring down the saturation until you have just a hint of color left.
We're getting there but the composition needs a little added evil looking detail. We need to dodge and burn a little bit but we don't want our changes to be undoable so we will put the effect on a new layer. With the face layer selected choose [layer-new-layer] from the menu, in the dialog set the mode to overlay and check the box that says "fill with overlay-neutral color". The premise here is simple, you will be painting white for highlighted (dodged) areas and black for the darker (burned) areas. Use a low flow on the brush for this work, a stylus is recommended but not a must. Now we want to use light and shadow to draw in some veins. Take your time and let your artistic abilities stand out.You might also want to darken the area under the eyes a bit for a more sinister look.
As it stands right now, the face doesn't blend well with the background so lets add some evil looking foreground elements. I chose a vine to match the background along with some barbed wire and inserted them in new layers above the face elements. Again the foreground images are de saturated. The reason for this is that we will want to colors to be consistent at the end, it is easier to colorize black and white elements though it can certainly be done with color backdrops as well. Be sure to mask the foreground elements so they blend in as well. You might want to have the color filled layer visible while masking to prevent errors.
Now it's time to make everything match up. Select the background layer and add a "hue/saturation" adjustment layer. Select colorize and drag the hue slider until you get the desired background color (brownish) in my case. Also play with the saturation until you get just the right look. Repeat the process for the foreground elements. With the foreground elements you will need to select the foreground layer in the layer palette, choose [select-load selection] and choose the foreground mask, if you don't then you will be applying the adjustment to all layers below it.
The eyes are always an important part of any portrait and this is no exception. Create a new layer and use the lasso tool to select the pupil of each eye. Use this selection to create a new layer mask. Now if you wanted to you could go crazy and create a wild looking eye but for the purposed of this tutorial we will just add some small reflection to bring life to the composition. The image is getting closer but it's not quite dark and evil looking. One of the last things you will want to do is add a "curves" adjustment layer above all other layers. These are the settings I used.
Finally you may want to create a new dodge/burn layer just below the curves layer to create some shadow or highlights to enhance the final product. There you have it. Your guide to creating the evil look in Photoshop.
