let’s get started.

Step 1.

Open the model in photoshop and using the Pen Tool (P), trace the contour. After you traced the contour, with the pen tool active, right click and choose “Make Selection”. Delete the background.

Create a new document 1500×1000 pixels and paste the model, name this layer model. Create a new layer below the model layer, fill it with Black color (#000000). Above the black color layer I placed the image given below as background and i decreased the opacity to 30% and I gave a name background to this layer

Step2

Now make some color adjustments as given below. It’s better to use Adjustments Layers because they are non destructive, in other words, you can eliminate the adjustment layer or modify it without affecting the original image.

Curves adjustment

Saturation adjustment

After making this adjustments, it looks like below

After this, with the help of burn tool make several passes along the edges of both images to give depth look and feel. Use a 40% of Exposure and Range: Shadows

Make some shadows on the background to give a more realistic look, to do this go to blending options by right clicking on the layers and clicking “Blending Options”. Add a Drop Shadow blending option by ticking on its appropriate checkbox. Change the Structure Angle -168, Distance 90, Size 25

After applying Burn tool and Drop Shadow it looks like

Step 3.

This is where the fun starts. I used some cosmic light images given below. If you want to make this with different images, follow the link Cosmic Lights and download Cosmic lights pack

I used one image from the Cosmic Lights pack and pasted it on a new layer below  Avinash’s layer but above the Background layers, change it’s Blending Mode to Screen

Now I opened another image from the pack, pasted it above the Avinash’s layer and changed the blending mode to Screen, just like I did with the previous one. You should get something like in the image below. As you can see we will use this technique for all stock images that have black background.

I took one more stock image and pasted it above Avinash’s layer near his knee and changed the Blend Mode to Screen

All the lights that we just added on step 3 look nice but we can make them look a bit better by adding some lights on the Model’s body. Create a new layer above the model layer name it as Lighting and change the Blend Mode to color, Select a soft edge brush we will start with the left leg the light that we need should match the color of the stock image that we used on step 3. With the soft brush selected paint along the edges of the leg. Do the same thing on the right leg but use the color that should match the color of the stock image that we used and paint on the same Lights layer.

Now we will move to the upper parts of the body and using more stock images from the packs mentioned earlier, add more lights. After adding all cosmic lights and applying light with Brush tool it looks like below.

I added one more stock image above the Background layer. It looks a bit better now

And Finally I added one layer above my image (Pavan’s layer). I took soft brush with the opacity of 50% and with Black color I painted along the edges of Pavan’s layer to bring some depth.

And the final output is...

Experiment with different cosmic lights images, backgrounds  to get wonderful effects.