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Step 6



Next I added a brightness/contrast adjustment layer this was to make the shirt lighter, increase the contrast on the face and neutralise the tone on the suit. So add a brightness/contrast adjustment layer and use about +67 for the brightness and about +42 for the contrast. Now you will notice that his left sleeve is now a bit too bright so click on the layer mask and use a soft brush with about 90% opacity, black and brush over this sleeve. I also brushed over the other side of the suit and the trousers this was just in case I added anything else to this part of the image. Keep working at it until you are happy, here is what mine looked like after applying this adjustment.

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Step 7



I next added another brightness/contrast this time with settings at -62 for brightness and +53 for contrast. This was to make the whole image darker while still retaining the contrast so no layer mask on this one. Then another brightness/contrast layer, this one was to darken the hair slightly. I used a brightness of -83 and a contrast of 0. Next click on the layer mask for this adjustment then go image>adjustments>invert, this will turn the layer mask black. Grab a soft brush with an opacity of about 80% and brush over some of the hair using white in the layer mask, and this actually darkens the hair.

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Step 8



Now I wanted to add some lighting to the background and also bring out the middle reflection of our man. So create a new layer directly above the background layer then select the brush tool and use a size of 300px and a hardness of 0% and an opacity of 100%. With white as the foreground color, brush from around the man's left shoulder, in a kind of, I used boomerang shape. Then go filter>blur guassian blur with 100px. Lastly change the opacity of this layer to 50%.

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Step 9



Now create a new layer group directly above the background layer and name it 'background', this will contain some detail to the background rather than just having it plain black. The first thing we will add to this layer group is some elliptical shapes which will be hardly visible. First select the gradient tool and in the main toolbar open up the gradient editor and make a gradient going from a very dark color; almost black to pure black. Now create a new layer and select the elliptical marquee tool and draw an ellipse select the gradient tool again and drag from one side of the ellipse to the other then deselect by going select>deselect. Do this four times with different ellipses, each time in a new layer. Below I have shown where I made the ellipses, I added a stroke to these just so you could see them in this tutorial but don't add a stroke to yours. Feel free to add a layer mask to any of these if you want to blend them more, I did it for one of my ellipses.

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Step 10



Next I created two more layers and used white splatter brushes, a lot of these can be found here but you can also get away with using some of the ones Photoshop has built in. Lower the opacity of these layers a lot and add a layer mask for any blending. Below you can see roughly where I put the splatters. All these details should be very faint but will build up gradually.

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