In this tutorial, I’ll show you the process of creating an Urbanized photo manipulation in Photoshop. The idea of this work is to show that a person lives more in a limited urban space and is absorbed by the endless expansion of cities.
To present the main idea of “Urbanized” photo manipulation I used:
Materials for the lesson – archive
This lesson is designed for users who own Photoshop at an average level, so some steps may seem complicated. But why not try!
Note: This Photoshop tutorial was made in Photoshop CS6, so earlier versions of Photoshop may be slightly different from the screenshots, and some brushes are exclusive to CS6.
The result of the lesson
Ok, let’s get started!
Step 1
Create a new document with dimensions. 950x1230 pixels with black background. Load the image with the model in Photoshop, separate it from the background and paste it into a new document. Adjust the size of the girl so that it fits under the workspace.
I want to smooth the skin of the model a little, so I apply the Blur filter on the surface: Filter> Blur> Blur Over Surface (Filter> Blur> Surface Blur).
And that’s what happened in the end:
Step 2
You can use a set of grunge brushes that you downloaded earlier to hide some parts of the model using mask
layer. I marked the hidden areas in red.
As you can see, I specifically erased the cheek and shoulder area (this is necessary for the next step, where we will add the city and the scrap metal texture around the model).
Add the following adjustment layers as clipping mask (clipping mask) to the layer with the model.
Black-white (Black and White)
Levels (Levels)
And you get the following effect:
Step 3
Add some urban landscapes to our work. Download the image of a city street in Photoshop and select the left part, as shown in the figure below.
Copy and paste the selection into the working paper, placing it on the right side of the canvas under the girl’s layer.
Add the following adjustment layers with clipping mask (clipping mask) to the new layer:
Black-white (Black and White)
Mask to correction layer Black and white:
Levels (Levels)
Go back to the layer with the street and create a selection around the store sign:
Copy and paste the selected area into the working document and place it in the lower right corner, setting the layer blending mode Overlap (Overlay):
Step 4
Now you can add metal scrap texture. Load the scrap image into Photoshop and use the tool Fast selection 
(Quick Selection tool) to select a part of the image, as shown below:
Copy and paste the selection into the working document. Use the option Deformation (Warp) in Free transformation (Free Transform) to adjust the shape as shown in the image:
When you are satisfied with the form, add an adjustment layer. Levels (Levels) with clipping mask (clipping mask) to the layer with metal texture.
At this stage you will have something similar:
You can go back to the image of scrap metal and select a few small pieces of texture, copy and paste them into the working paper. This way you will create the effect of brokenness and flying pieces.
Step 5
We are almost done! To add the final touches, I merged all the layers into one and duplicated it, applying a filter to it SmartSharpness (Smart Sharpen) with the following settings:
Add a mask To the layer with increased sharpness to hide the areas marked in red:
Add the following adjustment layers to give the image a color:
Selective color correction (Selective color)
Color balance (Color Balance)
And an optional step: I added a large signboard on top, setting the blending mode for this layer Overlap (Overlay).
And here is the final result.
I hope you enjoyed the lesson and you found something useful in it. Write comments if you have any questions.
See you! Have a nice day!
