The author of the video lesson: Elena Vinogradova
In the lesson, I will show you how to create a beautiful surreal photo effect in Photoshop. This is a lesson of average difficulty; therefore, some steps may not seem quite clear to you, but why not try it!
The purpose of this lesson is to consider several skills, such as:
1) Drawing Hair with the Pen Tool
2) Deformation of the object
3) Adding objects
4) Use of adjustment layers
Here is a preview of the final effect for this tutorial: (click to enlarge).
Ok let’s get started!
Materials for the lesson:
Step 1. Create a new document, 800px * 1100px in size, fill the background with black. Next on the new layer we will create some fiber structure through Filter – Render – Fiber (Filter-Rendering-Fibers) with the following settings:
Reduce the opacity of the layer to about 30%, and you will get the following effect:
Step 2. Download the image of the mountain in Photoshop, and cut out the part you need.
The author decided to add a trail of clouds to the foot of the mountain. To do this, we can use the Lasso Tool 
(Lasso Tool) (with 50px feathering) to make a selection, and add some cloud Filter-Rendering-Clouds:
Click (Ctrl + L) and thus open the Levels adjustment layer (Levels), apply the following settings to the cloud:
Further we deform it as shown below:
After you make the deformation, you must move the cloud to the foot of the mountain as shown below and merge these layers into a group:
Step 3. Group, created in step 2, name the “Mountain” and duplicate once, change its size (make it smaller in scale):
You could also do some brightening to the upper left side of the mountain to add some missing lighting dynamics effect:
Duplicate the group again and slide horizontally to the left side of the canvas, as shown below:
Step 4. Now use the cloud brush or cloud texture (any) to add another cloud to the mountain itself:
Open the image of the girl in Photoshop, select the model and position it as shown below:
Now we will create pieces of hair. Use the Pen Tool 
(Pen Tool), To draw a line, as shown below, below we choose a hard brush 3px in size to circle it:
Now select the dark hair color from the model layer:
Make a stroke of the line with this dark color (right click on the selection, choose to stroke the outline and tick the pen with a check, perform the action):
Now go back to the model layer and select a lighter color:
Make the following line in this color:
Duplicate the dark and light lines several times, tie them as shown below: (merge into one layer).
Duplicate the hair group, move the duplicated layers to different positions, and also resize, rotate them to get the best result:
Step 5. Now let’s add a star structure and draw some splash on the image to add some mystery to our work. No doubt you downloaded several brushes from the Internet – now is the time to use them!
Create a new layer under the model layer and draw some splash, position it as shown below:
also add some star structure to the position shown below:
Use the same cloud warping technique mentioned in the previous step for some nebula effect:
Now we will have the following form:
Step 6. Well, we are almost done. Let’s add some adjustment layers to give the image the desired result:
Black and white
Color balance
The layer mask on the color balance will look like this:
The author also added some light effects with a soft white brush to the places shown below: (Use the blend mode for the Normal brush (Normal) or overlay (Overlap)).
Step 7. Now we can do some final image retouching. As you can see, using all the brushes we created a lot of noise in the image, and we will reduce it a little.
To smooth the image, duplicate the background layer and do the following. Reduce Noise (Filter-Noise-Reduce Noise) with the following settings:
As you can see, using this filter we soften the hair that we created and got rid of a significant part of the unwanted noise in the image:
And here is our final version, obtained as a result of the work done on this lesson:
We hope that this lesson turned out to be interesting for you, and you have enjoyed the work you have done, as well as a bit of inspiration.
