Background Wrapped Around a Photograph on Photoshop.

I found a Youtube tutorial on how to get a background of anything wrapped around a photograph, at this stage I feel that trying out various things would give me an insight to what I want to take further particularly in digital work because I feel like I am improving using photoshop, I liked the look of the result on the video so I gave it a go.

I chose this photograph because it was ideal because of its plain background because this would mean it wouldn't interfere with the pattern that I could wrap around it, which would make it much too busy and unclear.
I thought that a splatter could work well so I found one on google images, it was black and white so I converted my photograph to black and white too.

1. I loaded my photograph onto photoshop and on a separate document I dragged in my paint splatter image.

2. Using the quick selection tool I deleted all of the plain white background in my photograph, using the move tool I dragged the body onto the splatter.

3. Using the free transform tool I positioned the body where I wanted it to be in the composition on the splatter.

4. I hid the paint splatter layer and on the body I went to the image tab, adjustments and levels. I dragged up the dark tones and dragged down the light tones on the scale to give an effective contrast and then clicked ok.

5. On the filter tab, I clicked blur again and this time chose gaussian blur. I put the radius at around 7 pixels to create a slight blur getting rid of the sharpness in my image. I went to file, save as, and named it 'displacement map' (saved somewhere where I can easily come back to it).

6. I clicked undo and went back to the way my photograph was before I adjusted the levels. I also made a copy of my paint splatter layer and dragged it above my body layer.

7. I went to filter, blur and displace, I changed the scales to 25 to make a harsher effect, it comes up with my documents, I found my map and loaded it, this displaced the pixels on my paint splatter like I wanted.

8. On my body tab, using the quick selection tool I selected the whole body, when back onto my displaced paint splatter layer, and clicked the layer mask icon.

9. On the blend mode of this layer, I changed it to overlay, multiply also worked well but was slightly too dark, I also changed the opacity to around 80.

10. I went to filter, blur and gaussian blur, I changed the radius to around 2.

11. I went to my original body layer and using the levels tool I upped my contrast to the appropriate level. 

12. I clicked the original paint splatter layer, above it I created a new layer, I filled this layer with white. Using the eraser at an opacity of 50 and a huge size taking up the whole of my document I clicked with it once to reveal the paint splatter pattern.

The finished result reminded me of artist Jackson Pollock because of the splatter pattern, if I choose to take this further I could easily link the work to this. I thought that the result was successful and if I decide to take this further I would take a more practical approach to creating the splatters.