GTA-like portraits in Photoshop

This is what you will achieve at the end of the tutorial:

Click to enlarge

The Tutorial

To start things up you'll need several things, first of course Photoshop, then look for a picture of yourself or a friend looking "GTA-style". I found this one in a friends' profile:

Click for full-res photo

Starting up

To start up, remove all background from the picture you have chosen. I usually use for this a layer mask, since it is easier to revert things.
To do that, in the bottom of the layers palette click on the third icon, the square one with a circle inside. What a layer mask does is it will hide everything painter on the mask in black. So get a black brush and paint in the layer mask everything that you want to delete. If you delete something you didn't want to, simply paint in white and you will restore it.
You'll get something like this:

Step 2

Now it's time to get a nice background for our pic. I recommend for this getting a real screenshot of the game, to make it more realistic. Searching in Google Images I found this one:

Put it behind the guy's pic, and move it, resize it, retouch it, until you get it looking nice.
At this stage I've got this:

Next step

It is time now to make our guy look as if it was drawn in the game. So select the guy's layer and press Cntrl+J to duplicate the layer, right click on the duplicated layer's mask and select "Apply mask", then go to Filter > Artistic > Cutout and move the sliders until you get it like this:

Now set that layer's blend mode to Soft Light. If the effect is too strong simply move the Opacity slider down.

After the cutout we might need to add a bit more "sharpness" to the lines in our character, so duplicate the initial layer (The one with the mask), apply the mask to this newly duplicated layer and go to Image > Adjust > Levels... and move the black end (left one) a bit to the right and the white one (right) a bit to the left. This way you'll get sort of sharper colors.

What now

Using a GTA logo (I chose the San Andreas one, since it is the most beautiful one for me) put it in the upper part, and over some sort of rounded black bg. This is how I did it:

As you can see, I've also put a gun on the guy's hand, it makes it a bit more GTA-style

Final steps

Now that it is looking pretty good, let's make it look simply outstanding. First we will pretend it is a broken glass, and then we will add the name of the guy on top.
To ensure that we can go back in case we screw up the whole thing make a new layer group (The folder icon at the bottom of the layers palette) and name it "original" or something like that. Make sure you hide all other layers, and leave only the guy and the background visible, and press Control+Alt+N and then Control+Alt+E. Now you'll have a new layer with all visible things combined on it. Hide the "original" folder, and make visible again the gta logo and the other layers you might have. If you hadn't done so already, create a blank layer underneath everything, and fill it with black.
Now with the Polygonal selection tool create "broken glass" cuts. Make sure you start in a common point all of them, and then go in zigzag from tiny to wide, from that point out of the combined layer.
Make sure that you delete the contents of those cuts, leaving only the black background.
When you are done, select the pieces left and move them around a bit.

I'll leave all this to your originality! Here is what I did, without the black background, so you can see the cuts:

We are almost done, the final step is to write the name of the guy on top. For that we need the font, so go to this page:
http://www.gta-sanandreas.com/downloads/
and browse for the font you like. I prefer to use Diploma, but you can use the one you like the most.
Download it and move it to C:\WINDOWS\Fonts\ (C:\ might change depending on your setup)

You might have to restart Photoshop for it to display the new font in the list of available ones.

Once you have it in Photoshop write anything you want, duplicate the layer, and to the one on top add a Stroke of 4px in Black. And to the one in the bottom add another Stroke of about 6-7px in White.
This will create the "double-stroke" effect in the logo.
To make it even more realistic double click on the text-layer and click on "Create warped text":
Note that the version I was using for this tutorial was in Spanish, but you'll be able to see the sliders and that kind of things

Make sure you apply those setting to both text layers!

And you are done!
Hope you enjoyed it, let me know how it went