Exploring Photoshop - Displacement maps & creating texture on an image

In todays lesson we were working on placing textures on our photos. The images I chose to use were my usual photograph of Sean and a scanography image I created with leaves and sticks yesterday. I wanted to try and layer the leaves image over Seans face but in a way that the image curved to fit his face, not lie flat on it.

The first step was to select a channel with a the most contrast. To do this I switched from the layers palette to the channels palette and flicked between the three colours there; red, green and blue. For my image the blue channel was the one with the most contrast. 

I now needed to duplicate this channel, to do this I right clicked on the channel, selected duplicate channel, renamed it Displacement Map and clicked okay. A copy of the channel then opened up in another tab so I could make further changes to it. I then added the median filter to this image by going to Filter > noise > Mediun & changing the radius to 8 pixels. After that I went on to apply the gaussian blur.

After applying the blur I converted the displacement map to grayscale to avoid having any problems with too many channels later. I then saved the displacement map and went back to the original image.

I selected the area which I wanted to apply the texture, which was Seans face and then saved that selection. I then copied the texture image (The leaves) over to my original image and resized it to cover Seans whole face. After that I changed the blend mode of the texture layer to overlay to make the texture look more realistic.

Now I needed to add my displacement filter, to do this I went to filter > distort > displace and then changed both horizontal scale and vertical scale to 15. After clicking okay another box came up so I could select the displacement mask I saved earlier. 

After applying my displacement mask the texture on the image looked a lot more realistic and even bent slightly around Seans features. I then cleared up any texture that spilled over is face by using the paint brush tool and cropped the image down.

This is the finished image. I'm actually very happy with the picture on the whole although I did really struggle with blending the texture out around the edges of his face and it still doesn't look perfect. I Although the process is quite long I'm reasonably happy with the outcome and I would really like to try something like this again using new images.