Photoshop Jack-o-lantern

Non-Messy Fun!  Start with a picture of a pumpkin. This one is small, but it was public domain and legal to use. I'd rather have chosen a better picture but I didn't have access to one. First I made soem copies of it, just in case, and I did have to trash one that didn't work out. 

 I used the lasso tool to mark where I wanted to cut out the features of Jack's face. Here the image is stroked so you can see it, but I took off the stroke before I cut out the selection. 

Here's the original with the cutouts and a second layer that hasbeen set to difference to make it darker. I experiemented with the layer blending until I got one I liked. I wanted night instead of afternoon.

I made a simple gradient with red and yellow to make the color for the featueres. But it did not show up as much as I wanted it to, so I kept on trying some other variations.  

 I used re-select to copy and paste the features from the gradient layer to  a transparent layer. The first set was not strong enough, so the second tiem, I used the expand feature under select to make the selection bigger. I used the radial zoom blur on each one. I really like that effect, as you can see. 

 I decided to blur the difference layer too. It makes very weird effects when the difference layer is over the gradient with no other layers. I was getting somewhere. 

 These are the third and fourth layers:

gradient, original, burn, small features, large features

 the final image has one more copy of the original on top set at soft light to allow the other pumpkins to show up. I am very pleaseed with this effect. It took about 30 minutes to do, less time than it took to upload the images and type the article. I hope you like it.