Superimposing An Image On Paper

I had a few people ask me how I placed the image of Hannah on paper in a previous post, so I'm going to try to explain it very briefly. If I miss something, or if you want to know more you can email me or leave a comment.

I'm using Photoshop CS4 and a graphics tablet, but you can do the same thing with the last few versions of photoshop.

Final image preview.

This is a barely edited version of the original portrait.

This is my paper image. I took two normal pieces of paper ( I was out of card stock) and folded them over in different directions until I got the look I wanted, and then took a picture with them sitting on a flat piece of paper. Obviously I desaturated it at this point, but I haven't done much else to this image yet.

Here you can see it coming together a bit more. I have a high contrast version of Hannah over my paper, and I've given the paper a bit of a vignette, and decreased the contrast a little.

To get the photo to look somewhat flat and printed I decreased the layer opacity to 72%. Now to get the wrinkles of the paper to come thru and merge with my wrinkled backdrop, I set Hannah's layer blend mode to multiply. You can see the fold of the paper thru Hannah's layer now.

I selected the fold with a polygonal lasso, and created a layer mask. Then I selected a grungy brush, and masked around the edges of my portrait to give it an abused look, and blend it with the wrinkles of the paper.

To give it an old magazine look I used the halftone filter on Hannah's layer. I created a flat version of the entire image, and added some noise to blend it all together, along with a gradient map to ensure that there are no true blacks in my image. I also added a lighting effect to increase the directional light coming from the bottom left of the image.

This is a somewhat condensed description of how I merged these photos together, but I hope it'll be useful to all you photographers and graphic artists out there.

And once again feel free to contact me if you want to know more, or if there are any other images you'd like me to break down a little for you. If there's any interest, I'm more than happy to share what I've learned with all of you.

Thanks for reading!