Photoshop - cracked skin

I decided that learning to edit cracks onto someone's face might be useful for our poster, so I looked up a tutorial on youtube which is embedded at the end of this blog.

Steps for creating cracked skin:

Step 1) To being with I had to find an image of someone's face with nothing going on in the background to make it easier to edit. I also had to find an image of either cracked skin or dry cracked earth.

Step 2) I then opened these images up on photoshop and made the woman's face the background of the image.

Step 3) I then had to make the cracked earth less opaque by making it more transparant so it didn't just sit over the top of the photo and so that the browney colour of the earth wasnt visible and only the cracks were.

Step 4) Once I did this I had to 'wrap' the image of the cracked earth around the face to give it a more 3D look and to make it more realistic.

Step 5) Although this did make it look realistic, it still wasn't tight around the face and there was some of the image that was on the background of the image, therefore I then had to liquidify the cracked earth to get rid of all of the image that wasn't on the face.

Step 6) Although this did look quite effective, many of the cracks were over her eyes, nose and lips which didn't look quite right, therefore I then had to liquidify again to move the cracks so they wrapped around the features effectively and looked realistic.

Problems I faced:
I did encounter a few problems along the way such as:
- trying to get the liquidifying tool to work, as it wasn't allowing me to click on the tool although I had followed the instructions correctly.
- making subtle changes with liquidifying tool, I was too rough with pushing the image around and so it made the image all bumpy and made it sit badly on her face.
- trying to make the cracks look more realistic and make them wrap around the features, I found this more difficult to do as all the cracks were going over her eyes and lips which wouldn't look     realistic.