How to Create an Abstract Photo Manipulation

I lowered the hardness of the brush to 0% for this part as the feathers need to look soft.

This is what it looked like after cutting the parrot out, well done if you’ve made it this far it’s easy sailing from here on.

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Step 5

We are going to use some watercolor brushes to create the painted effect, watercolor brushes have become really popular recently and the set I tend to use can be found hereso download and install them; you may need to restart Photoshop to get them properly installed. We are going to create all the watercolor effects behind the parrot so create a new layer then move it below the layer with the parrot in it. Select the eyedropper tool then click somewhere on the tail(is that what its called?), this is to get a reddish color that matches the color of the bird. Now select the brush tool and choose one of the watercolor brushes then click once to get the effect shown below. If you want to rotate the brush then go Window>Brushes>Brush Tip Shape and move the arrow in the circle that looks like a compass.

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Step 6

Do this again twice using different brushes and use yellow and blue as the colors. You should end up with something similar to the image below.

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Step 7

I then used some splatter brushes in random colors to add some more detail which you can see below. Feel free to use different brushes but I liked the effect gained from using the splatter brushes.

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Step 8

You now need to find an image of a rainforest or a jungle, ideally something with lots of green plants. I tend to get my stock images from SXC so copy an image then paste it into your document and move it behind the watercolor strokes then resize it and position it like so.

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Step 9

Select the layer with your jungle image then hold Alt and click on the layer mask button to, this time, create a black layer mask so this will hide your jungle image. Change the foreground color to white then select the layer mask then the brush tool and using a 0% hardness brush of about 100px diameter brush at parts round the parrot to unhide bits of the plants. In this step I only did the bits around the parrots back.

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