I tried something new today. Textures! Except this happened, by accident, when I was trying to produce the second image. I love happy accidents.

This really couldn't have been easier. I took a very bland photo of me against a white wall (no nice lighting equipment, just had all of my window shades pointed upwards for diffused natural light), and made it high-contrast in Photoshop. Then I found an image of a nebula with a lot of textures and bright, visible stars, made that very contrasty too, and set it to overlay. It produced something vaguely like the image below. I liked it, but wanted just a bit more nebula goodness, so I duplicated that layer, rotated it (so I wouldn't repeat images), and repositioned until I liked it. From there, I selectively dodged the portrait photo to blend my face  into the background, or reduce the darkness produced with two overlay layers. You can see I added diamondy stars on the bottom for variety (hand drew them with the brush). Really easy peasy, guys!

The above photo happened when I set the second nebula layer to (I think screen) instead of overlay. Looked really cool and because the edge of my face was blown out from making it so contrasty, it actually smoothly blended in with the stars. I liked that, so I saved the "mistake" image separately and went back later with the healing tool to blend things in. The great thing about an image with lots of fuzzy abstract soft shapes is that you can set the healing tool to something very large, and it'll blend the two sides together in a natural sort of way. You can't do that on a normal photo because the sample size is too big and you'll have a giant splotch falling out of my face. Here, giant splotches are exactly what the image was. It worked nicely!