yyyyThis is a great tutorial to play around with and teaches you a lot about layers. If you are nervous about using layers in Photoshop then this tutorial should get you around that.

You will need four pictures.

untitled-11. A photo of a brick wall (any plain brick wall will do)

2. a head shot - go wild and pull an interesting face if you want to - maybe screaming to get out or something like that!

3. a picture of each of your hands. Hold onto the side of a wall or a door frame (preferable something a very different colour from your skin to make it easy to cut out the background and just have your hands)

 

Now open you wall photo in Photoshop.

Double click the background layer to turn it into an editable layer. Then create a new layer and drag and drop the new layer to sit below your background layer. I filled my new layer in with black paint.

Working on your brick layer again; Using your favorite selection tool, select the area of bricks you want to cut out. (I used the polygonal lasso tool) Select random brick without keeping a pattern as you want it to look like those bricks were broken out by hand.
With your selection highlighted - click Selection on the top menu bar > refine edges > and in the window that pops open you can smooth your edges and feather them slightly so that they don’t look so obviously cut out. Click OK.

Back on your image with your bricks selected > press delete. The bricks will disappear and your background layer will be visable through the ‘hole in the wall’

Now drag and drop your face photo onto the brick photo in Photoshop. It will be added to your layers list. You can move the face layer to sit beneath your brick layer and above your background. You might need to transform the face layer so that it fits nicely in your gap. If you need to do this - click Ctrl+A (select all) then Ctrl+T (Transform) and now you can move the little corner anchors of the face layer in to adjust the size. Hit enter when you are done.

I had to adjust the colouring of my face layer as it was too red. (I did this using hue and saturation; there is a tutorial for it on our blog)
I also darkened the face layer a bit so that it looked slightly darker than the brick layer (it is sitting below the bricks after all)

Now we need to cut out the hands. Open one of your hand pics in Photoshop. If you photographed your hand on a very different colour background then it will be easy to clean out the background. Using your magic eraser with a tolerance set to around 20 - 30 you can just click on the background bits between the fingers that you don’t want there. To neaten it up you can use your polygonal selection tool and select around all the fingers (carefully) and then rightclick your selection and say > select inverse. Then click Delete.

Just your hand should be left. Click Ctrl+A (select all) then Ctrl+C (copy) > then go to your brick and face layers and click Ctrl+V (paste) and your hand will now appear in a new layer in your work.

Now you are going to have to resize and position your hand. Ctrl+A then Ctrl+T will let you do this. You can spin it around (hold your mouse on the corner of your anchor points around the hand and a little curved arrow will appear) and move it about until it is positioned on the brick wall in a realistic place. You will most likely need to adjust colouring for your hand as well. (Hue and saturation)
Then move your hand layer to the very top above the brick layer (you can drag and drop it there)

Repeat these steps for your other hand.

Now with both your hands in the right position and with the right colouring you can merge just the two hand layers into one. Right click on the very top hand layer and in the menu that appears select > Merge down. This will only merge the current layer into the one below it. (IE - your two hand layers)

Now you can add your shadow effects. Right click your hand layer and select Blending Option. You can add a drop shadow. (adjust the size and distance of your drop shadow as you see fit)

On your brick layer you can add a drop shadow (to sit over your face layer) and an inner shadow (to give depth to the brick wall)

Here is how your layers and image should look:
You can see each layer and the effects that are applied to the layer.
brick-tutorial

You might need some final brightness&contrast adjustments just to match up the lighting on all the layers - but you are pretty much done!

Now you can save your image as a single layer image. File > Save As > Jpeg.