Our pumpkins:

Remove the background using the Magic Wand tool and Delete.

Desaturate the pumpkins so there is still some color left in them. CTRL+U

Adjust the Levels. CTRL+L Bring up the darkness, lower the lightness and adjust the midtones.

Take the picture of the skull, copy and paste it onto a new layer. Resize it to fit the pumpkin.

You might need to stretch it just a little to fit – don’t overdo it, it will make it look distorted.

Darken the black by adjusting the Levels. CTRL+L Click on the left eyedropper icon, then click somewhere on the black area and it will darken the whole picture.

Magic Wand select the black area, or use the Eraser to remove the larger portion of it.

Change the Blending option for the skull’s layer in the Layers window from Normal to Multiply.

Using the Brush Tool, select the color black and then fill in the eyes a little more.

With the Eraser tool, select a Soft Round Brush. Turn the Opacity down to 20%, and scale the brush down. Click multiple times around the edges of the skull that you can see, you want it to have a smooth transition into the pumpkin.

Readjust the position of the skull if you need to.

Move onto the next skull.

Adjust the Levels CTRL+L to darken the black, then delete the excess area around the skull. Change the Blending option to Multiply.

Use your Eraser with the Soft Round brush and smooth out the edges of the skull and trim in towards the eye.

And place your next skull using the same processes.

Go back through and trim up the edges and things on each of the skulls if they look off.

Since two of the pumpkins are missing mouths, we have a couple other skulls we’re going to steal mouths from.

This first one is a line drawing so we’ll have to treat it a little differently, but still using the same techniques.

Blending option to Multiply and erase everything but the mouth area.

Fill in the gap in the corner of the mouth with black.

Erase more using the Soft Round brush.

Because it is a black and white image, without any color at all, we need to add a tint of color to it. CTRL+U and click the colorize box, and adjust the Hue and Saturation until you find something that matches the other skulls colors (these are almost a brown-purple color).

And then go through the normal process for the larger pumpkin.

Okay, now we need a background.

Find a picture of some leaves you like. Copy and paste it into a layer under the pumpkins. Resize it if you need to. If it’s not quite big enough, it’s okay to stretch a little, we’re going to blur it out anyway.

CTRL+U and lower the Saturation.

Add a layer on top of the leaves layer. Use the Gradient tool with a linear gradient, and the colors black and white. Make the gradient with the black starting at the bottom and at white at top. Change the blending option to Color Burn.

Now adjust the Levels CTRL+L of the leaves layer.

And now to make the leaves out of focus.

Filter>Blur>Gaussian Blur

Let’s add some texture to make the pumpkins look like they have been hanging out outside.

Find a rust image or something with good texture and copy it.

CTRL+click on the pumpkin layer in the Layers window – this will select around the pumpkins.

Paste the texture into the selection CTRL+SHIFT+V

Change the texture’s Blending option to Soft Light.

Now click on the leaves layer again and we’ll add a lighting effect. I don’t really like this effect for many things, but I like it with this image.

Filters>Render>Lighting Effects

Position the lighting similar to this image:

Done!