Create a Paint Splash Effect in Photoshop with Natalia Seth

Tutorial Description

Natalia Seth (@escapingyouth) shows us how she created the paint splash effect in one of her most popular conceptual portraits. Learn how to make accurate selections, blend images together, adjust color, and match lighting for composites.

This tutorial is just a small taste of what you’ll learn in Natalia’s PRO tutorial Surreal Portrait Compositing with Natalia Seth. She breaks down her entire editing process, while showing you how she created four of her most extraordinary self-portraits.

It’s a great time to join PHLEARN PRO! You’ll get full access to Natalia’s tutorial, as well as hundreds of others that teach you beginner to advanced techniques in Photoshop, Lightroom, photography and more.

Creative Compositing

Natalia has a knack for creating colorful and energetic work with her photography and compositing skills. To create this image, she took a portrait of herself alongside the colorfully-painted arm of a friend. She then splashed the same paint used on her friend’s arm onto sheets of white paper and took several photographs of those.

Using Photoshop, Natalia made selections of different paint patterns from the paper and placed them over the portrait to create the effect of paint bursting from her eye.

Learn how to make clean selections using the Quick Selection tool, refine those selections with select and mask, transform the shape of the paint patterns, and make adjustments to light and color using a variety of Adjustment Layers.