Swapping heads with photoshop
The one thing everybody always seems to want to know in Photoshop is how to superimpose their head onto somebody Else’s body. In this tutorial we will create a pretty unbelievable but strangely convincing head swap in a few simple steps.
Tutorial images:
Step 1:
Make a nice quick selection around the old mans head with the lasso tool and ctrl + drag it over onto the bodybuilder where it will be placed onto its own layer for us. Obviously the head is going to be too large so we will enter free transform by hitting ctrl + T to re size it. The trick here is to reduce the opacity of the old mans head so we can judge the size and position we need to reduce it to. Resize the head by holdiing down shift and dragging the corner handles inwards, move the eyes of the old man into position over the bodybuilders eyes to get a feel for how much reduction is needed and to know where we need to finish it up. You may also want to rotate it very slightly clockwise!
Step 2:
Once you are happy with the size and position accept the transformation by hitting enter and bring the layers opacity back up to 100%. Next step is to mask out the unwanted areas of the old mans head with a layer mask and the brush tool with a fairly hard setting so our edges don’t turn out all fuzzy. Don’t worry too much about his hair or the bodybuilders head showing behind as we will deal with them later.
Step 3:
We will now need to patch up the area around our new head to remove any remanence of the bodybuilders head. Add in a new layer above the background and below our head layer and arm yourself with the stamp tool, hit S and your there. Set the stamp tool to sample all layers and paint over the areas we want to cover up, make sure you sample from different areas so that your clone work doesn’t look repetitive. You should now have something similar to mine below.
Step 4:
We now have the head in the right position with the background fixed but there is a few things left to do to make it somewhat believable such as fix the neck area and of course sort out the colour mismatch. Add yourself a curves adjustment layer to the top of the layer stack but when doing so hold down alt, click the adjustment layer icon at the foot of the layers palette, scroll up the list and select curves, check the “use previous layer to create clipping mask” option and click ok. This way the adjustments will only be affecting the head layer. In curves we are going to address the skin colour issue, we need to use a little experience here in judging which colours need to be adjusted to get the skin tones to match. This takes some simple deduction and looking at the old mans head we can see that we need to bring up the red, green and yellow slightly and perhaps lighten the RGB channel slightly. If that sounds over your head simply go with my settings below but I’d advise at least having a go first.
Mask out the curves layer from the hair and eyes and we should be ready to tackle the neck area, you should be somewhere near the image below.
Step 5:
Now we are ready to tidy up the neck area and add a little realism, take a soft brush with an opacity of between 5 and 10% and paint away (on the head layers mask!) the neck area up towards the chin in stages to blend it in with the bodybuilders neck line. Now add in a new layer to the top of the stack and set its blend mode to soft light, take a soft black 2 pixel brush with a low opacity of about 10% and paint in some convincing wrinkles around the neck area. You may want to step back after and reduce the opacity of the layer to get a good blend.
Finishing up:
The only other thing that needs to be done is to add a few fly away hairs to make the masking around the hair line more believable. To do this take the smudge tool with a small brush about 2 or 3 pixels and a strength of 50% and smudge the mask of the head layer to create some loose looking hairs.
We now have a pretty convincing result even though the image is completely unbelievable, Imagine how good you could look on that dating profile!! Sneaky!
Posted on October 29th, 2008 under Photoshop tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
