Create a painting looks in photoshop

01. Open both the portrait and the world map images and put them in one document.

02. Duplicate the portrait layer and desaturate

03. Apply a curve (input 106, output 126) to the B&W portrait layer because we won’t make are image to dark.
Because our world map is a little too dark and dull we’ll do the following :

04. Apply to the world map a curve (input 83, output 141)

05. After that increase saturation (master +45)

06. The land masses look good, but the water is still too dark. Therefor I used the ‘replace color’ (image > adjustments > replace color) Sample the water with a fussiness of 200 and then set hue to 0, saturation +58 and lightness +45. Now the water should have the desired color and intensity.

07. Duplicate the world map layer

08. Use again the replace color tool but now on the copied world map layer. Sample the water with fussiness set to 200 and increase lightness to +100. In that way the water will turn white. This will give us the opportunity to vary the intensity of the landmasses and the water separately.

09. Set blending mode of the ‘wold map blue’ layer to linear burn with opacity 72%

10. Set blending mode of the ‘wold map white’ layer to color burn with opacity 14%

11. Our image is still a little to dark, therefore I used the a curve to correct this (39,53 // 92,133 // 180,192)

Skipping the step 2 will give you this result