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Creating a Vector Composite Effect from a Photo 

This tutorial will demonstrate how to take an image, in this case a woman's face, and give the appearance that it is entirely composed

of vector shapes. Along the way, we'll use some fairly basic techniques, including clipping masks and displacement maps, to achieve a

unique effect!

This is the image we'll be creating:

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Step 1

To begin, create a new document of pretty much whatever size you'd like. I personally prefer a wider look for this effect, but any sizeshould work. You should however probably stick to a landscape aspect ratio, at least for following this tutorial.

I chose an image size of 720 x 480 pixels, at a resolution of 300 pixels per inch.

Once you've created your new image, fill the background layer with solid black.

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Step 2

Next, we have to find an image to work with. I chose a picture of a woman's face that I found on the stock photography websitestock.xchng, however, the owner of the photo requested that I credit the website iofoto.com, so I've just put both here.

You can use an image of almost anything for this effect, but to follow this tutorial, your best bet is to choose an image similar to mine,

i.e. a human face.

Once you have your image, place it into your document as a new layer. Remove everything else in the picture, just leaving the face.

I've also adjusted the brightness and saturation on my image. You can preserve the entire person's head, but I personally think the

effect looks better with the back of the head being cutoff, leaving just the face.

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Step 3

Duplicate the face layer, and make sure it's positioned exactly on top of the original face. Press Shift + Control + U to desaturate thelayer, and then go to Filter > Blur > Lens Blur. Make sure the setting for Source is selected as Transparency, and use settings of 10,

0 and 0 for Radius, Blade Curvature and Rotation, respectively. We'll see later on why blurring this layer is necessary.

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Step 5

Now, select your first vector shape layer, and go to Filter > Distort > Displace. Leave the Horizontal and Vertical Scale values at

10, and select the Stretch to Fit and Repeat Edge Pixels options and click OK. When the file dialog appears, select the file you saved

earlier as 'dispmap' (or whatever you called it) and click Open.

For anyone unfamiliar with this feature, displacement mapping takes an object or layer, in our case a vector shape, and, using another

image file (a displacement map) transforms the image so that it would fit over the map. It determines this by the color of each pixel in

the displacement map, with lighter pixels corresponding to what would be a higher area on a 3D model of the image. The reason we

copied the original image of the woman's face and desaturated it was to allow for an easier mapping by eliminating colors. We also

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blurred the image because displacement mapping in Photoshop is very accurate. If we had tried it on the original image, our vector

shapes would appear choppy because in reality they were mapped to the smallest bumps and textures on the woman's skin. Blurring

the image slightly leaves only the smooth contours of the woman's face, allowing for our vector shapes to maintain their smoothnessbut still conform to the face.

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Step 6

Once you have used the displacement mapping on all of your vector shapes, you need to then duplicate your original image layer asmany times as the number of shapes you have. What we need is a copy of the original image for every vector shape we have, with the

copy on top of its shape in the layers palatte. When you're finished arranging everything, you will have alternating image and vector

shape layers, starting at the top with an image layer.

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Step 7

We now need to create the clipping masks that will transfer our original image into the vector shapes. So, for each copy of the image

layer in the layers palatte, right click it and select Create Clipping Mask. Don't worry if no visible changes occur; you won't see them

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until you make the very last clipping mask. You can tell if you've made the mask successfully if there is a small arrow pointing down

in the image layer, and the vector shape layer below it is underlined.

Step 8

Once you have made all of the clipping masks, you should begin to see the final image take shape. However, we're not done just yet.

Now select the topmost vector shape layer, and add a drop shadow to it. I used an angle of 140 degrees, and settings of 10, 10 and 20

for Distance, Spread and Size, respectively.

Once you've got a shadow effect that looks good, right click on that vector shape layer and select Copy Layer Style. Then, right click 

all of the other vector shape layers and select Paste Layer Style.

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Step 9

At this point we've finished the final effect on the image. I added a Radial Gradient to the background to give the impression thatlight is coming from the left to match the general shading of the image.

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This technique can be applied to any image using any vector shapes. The key to making it look convincing is matching the vector

objects to the shape, countours, and flow of the object image they're to be wrapped around. It's an odd effect, but I hope you were able

to gain something from this tutorial, and good luck with your own work!

Finally I have added some text, and darkened the neck area so it sits further in the shadows. Additionally I upped the contrast to makethe image a little more eerie.

Final Image