Advanced' Photo Effects Tutorials

I guess it's a chicken and egg- kinda question; what comes first, the tiger or the jar? Personally I did the jar first so that's where I'm going to start. Also the jar is the boring, time consuming bit and I like to get those out the way first.

So first we need a nice big jar. Bit of hunting around turned up this fella

Colour worked out ideal - nice deep oranges and whites to compliment the endangered mammal we're going to stuff inside.

Before we can fill the jar with tigery goodness, we're going to have to remove that unsightly foetus, which we do in two stages, using the Clone Tool. I'm not going into clone tool in this tutorial but if you don't know how to use it Qofcheez has done a great intro here

The first stage is to clone from the top down, creating the dark liquid. It's important to work straight down so you carry the highlights in straight lines to end up like so

This is not the neatest clone-job by far but it's perfectly adequate for our purposes.

Next we need to collect the murky, sedimenty gunk that forms in these specimen jars. Working from the bottom up, using the clone tool again we end up like so.

Okay that's the boring stuff out the way, now it's time to chop a tiger to bits! If you need test subjects sxc.hu has a sizeable menagerie. I ended up using three of their best ones to get all the parts I needed.

I started from the head and layered body parts upward but it's entirely up to you. Using liquify where things needed tweaking, especially with the tail which I put in last (learned everything I know about liquify here - thanks again to Qofcheez). Between the layers I added a drop shadow (set to multiply and airbrushed in black) to add a bit of depth between the bits. You could use the layer blending options but that's lazy and ugly and you may even burn in hell for it.

After some frenetic cutting and pasting and cackling maniacally we end up with this (I left the original jar image in the background as a sort of rough template to work to)

Looks revolting doesn't it? Don't panic, We're not finished yet. Now we bring back those two layers of jar from the first part. You remember those, right? Or were you having so much fun chopping up Christopher Robin's bestset buddy that you forgot all about them?

If they're not already, move the two jar clones to the top of the layers pallet (light one at the top and dark one below it) Set the blending mode to "Soft Light" for the top layer then select the sediment layer, go to the layers menu and add a Layer Mask (hide all)

Now we can paint up the mask from the base so that everything looks like it's sinking into that lovely cloudy gunk. If you're a bit stuck, bpkelsey did a good tutorial on working with layer masks here (changed my life that tut, seriously!)

So if you've been following you should be looking at something like this

Just a couple of levels tweaks away from done!