In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to turn image 1 into image 2. This tutorial can also be used for cloudifying things in general.
I used a source of a greek statue to turn into clouds. I used the magic eraser for large areas, and then just the eraser to get the left-over bits and pieces, to get the image from the background.
Now, I put the image of the statue onto the image of the clouds. You can either drag the layer, or edit:copy:paste on the new picture, but I suppose that's pretty obvious. After I got the picture on, it was way to big, so I resized it to fit and put it a place I liked.
Now, to make it easier to blend, I changed the statue's color. Using the eyedropper tool, I took a color sample of nearby clouds, and got a color that I wanted the statue to be. There are many ways to change the color of a image, but I prefer image:adjustments:hue and saturationThen, I clicked "colorize", and then increase saturation. I played around with saturation, hue, and lighting to get it perfect. Then I clicked okay. Fascinating, no?
Then, I set the layer with the statue in it to about 50% opacity, enough so that it was slightly transparent.Next, I createad a new layer. I named it "cloud smudge", but you can name it whatever you want. It just has to be under 240 letters.
Next, using the layer I just made, I clicked the smudge brush, and set it to about 12 px, with a strength of about 65. Click "USE ALL LAYERS". On this layer, I smudged along the contours and lines of the statue, and blended its edges until they looked soft and the statue looked smoother and more cloud like.
For areas of light and dark on the statue that don't match the clouds, I used a white brush for light spots, a dark blue for dark spots, and, with the brush tool, color in areas of light and dark on the clouds that don't match with the statue. Sometimes, I changed the opacity of the brush, because the white was too white, or the dark blue was too dark. Then, I smudged these areas to make the light and dark blend with the statue and the clouds
Now for the bottom, I repeated the same steps as before: I smudged along the contours and blended the image into the clouds
So I was basically done, but it needed some finshing touches. I merged all the layers together (layer:merge visible), but the colors weren't quite perfect. I went to image:adjustments:hue and saturation and bumped up the saturation a bit, and played around the hue just a smidge.Here's the end result:So that's it! Now you can go out and cloudify stuff on your very own.