Photoshop Tutorials

Turn a woman into an alien by combining two photos. This tutorial will teach you several photo manipulation techniques for creating scary photo manipulations.

Alien Photo Manipulation Photoshop Tutorial

Preview of final results

Stock Photos

For this tutorial, you’ll need a photo of a persons head, octopus, and any grunge texture. If you like to use the same portrait of the face used in this tutorial, you may click on the image below to purchase it. Note that we only have the download link for the image of the woman.

Step 1 – Open the octopus photo

Begin by loading the image of the octopus.

Step 2 – Detach an arm from the octopus

First, delete the white background. To do this, use the magic wand tool to create a selection of the white background then press delete on your keyboard to remove the background. Select the lasso tool and create a selection of one of the arm. Then, press Ctrl+J to create a new layer with the selected areas as its content.

Step 3 – Combine several arms together

Repeat the previous step several times until you get about five arms. They should each be on their own layers. Start by using the transform tool (Edit > Free Transform) to rotate, resize, and position them together like the image below. Add a layer mask to each of the layers then, with a soft brush, erase in the layer mask to blend the arms together.

Step 4 – Combine the octopus arms with the portrait photo

On the document with the octopus arm, copy the entire image into the clipboard. To do this, press Ctrl+A to select all then press Shift+Ctrl+C to copy merged. Open the portrait photo then press Ctrl+V to paste the octopus arms. Position it on the mouth. Add a layer mask to the layer with the octopus arms then, using a brush with a hardness setting of 0%, erase the edge slightly to blend it with the face.