*blows away the dust* I return. With a curiously similar banner. *cringe* Anyway. This one got quite strange.
1. I started with a picture of Julian Casablancas looking cool, because I basically had no idea what I was doing when I started out (yes, this happens a lot, I admit. It’s not such a bad thing, really). I duplicated that layer twice, setting the first to Screen 37% and the second to Soft Light 37% (this will vary depending on your image).
2. The coloring’s not the main focus of this tutorial, so I’ll briefly go over it. I added a brown Exclusion layer (100%) and a purple Luminance (L) layer at 26%, then upped the contrast with a Curves layer. It looked like this:
3. This was where things got tricky and bizarre. I found another picture of Julian and stuck it beneath the Exclusion layer (to make things easier we‘ll call that Jules 2 for now). I went to Edit > Copy Merged and pasted it at the top as a new layer.
I set it to invisible, then went back and set Jules 2 to invisible as well, which put us back with the original image and coloring.
Edit > Copy Merged for this as well, and paste that as a new layer at the very top, set to Lighten 100%.
This layer and the one beneath it should now both be visible (uncheck the ‘invisible’ box).
Then I moved the Lighten layer until it was in a spot that looked interesting.
4. I was originally going to add lyrics from a song by The Strokes, but nothing looked right, so I stuck a brush overtop instead.
And there you go.
Sorry for this being unnecessarily complicated. I wish you the best of luck in deciphering it, though it should give you some idea of how I created my banner.