IDEA:
I got the idea for this picture while driving for several hours in my car. I had to drive all day to visit some customers of mine.
It's nice to kill the time, workin' out an idea and create it in your mind.

Once I got back home, I directly went to the bowl of fruits that is standing on our kitchen table.
Here I found this apple, looking fresh and red.
So I waited for several days till the apple went old and brown. This was the time to create the picture.

PICTURE:
First I did the set up in the homestudio. Two softboxes, one from the right and one from the left.
I selected a nice wallpaper for the background and put this on the background support of my home studio.
As you can imagine, this picture was build up from 2 different pictures. The first picture was from the apple with the knife stuck in the top.
After finding the right light and finnishing this picture, I removed the scene and sat down between the softboxes to photograph my own face using a remote controll and using the same light set up.
Both pictures where shot in RAW.

WORKFLOW:
As both of the pictures where shot in RAW, I got the oppertunity to make both pictures a pseudo HDR.
With 3 different exposures each, I opened the two pictures in Photomatix pro an gave the pictures an old and used look.
After this I opened the two HDR pictures in Photoshop.

From the picture with my face, I made a rough selection of the face and placed it behind the apple layer.
It's just a matter of rotating an transforming of the selected face to match the shape op the apple.

After fitting the face to the apple, I put a layer mask on the apple layer.
Using a black, white and grey brush on this mask layer, I slowely brushed the face into the apple.
This part of the processing took most of the time.

After creating the eyes, nose and mouth, the pictures looked odd and not realistic.
The area around the eyes, mouth and espacialy the chin and nose did not show any structure of an apple at all.
At this point I decided to copy some parts of the original apple in these unreal looking parts an brought back the structure using the grey brush in the layer mask.

After finnishing the face in the apple, I used dodge and burn to darken the lines of the face and lighting up the upper cheak. At this point the apple got the shapes of a face I had in mind. At this stage I was happy to see that the picture worked out like the way I wanted.

Now it was only a matter of the finnishing touch!

I flattened the layers and made a new background copy.
At this layer I put a blur filter and sharpend some parts of the picture.
A new layer in black and white an blending these two layers to get an off-colour effect.
After I was satisfied, I made the final crop to get a nice composition and opened the picture in Photoscape to do some nice vigneting.

After one evening of photographing and processing it is great to see the picture you had in mind!

Hope you all like this tutorial.
Sorry for my English. (I did my best........)

Regards,

Abel

Great tutorial, English was perfect!

Great! thanks for sharing and congratulations for your work

Thanks for sharing .

thank you for your explanation.

Thanks for sharing .Greate work

Thanks, and many congratulations.