facial tutorial

Out of context: Reply #9

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  • detritus0

    YOU SHOULD ALL BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELVES.

    Nonetheless, just in case you missed the basic 'structions at the bottom of that page, here they are..

    1. Find a picture to start with. Seems simple enough but I'm pretty picky about it. Should be good res but not huge. Also the lighting has to be decent (no bright light spots or tons of shadows that cant be correct enough in PS).

    2. Have a large collection of "stock" photos to use. Since I started doing this a couple months ago I have a decent collection, and there are definitely a few I use more than others.

    3. Choose the right stock photo to use. Basically, I look for angle of the face first, that way you dont have to skew to much in PS. Next is lighting and size. The bigger the res in the stock photo the easier it is to work with, but if you have to upscale it 10% or so it isnt a big deal; the lighting should be similar to that of the photo you want to enhance. Doesnt have to be prefect but use some discretion.

    4. Open both in PS, and zoom in to the area you want to use on the stock photo then select it with the lasso tool but get some skin in it too. So in other words maybe 10 pixels or so as a buffer zone around the target. Dont use the magic want or the new thing, just do it by hand. Also, dont do too huge of an area or it will be harder to line up. Copy it.

    5. Paste it. Ctrl+t to free transform and resize it, rotate it and move it to where it needs to be. If you need to reshape (not too often do I do this) use warp instead of liquefy (edit>transform>warp).

    6. Okay Ill be a little presumptuous and assume you can use layers and such. What you wanna do is use adjustment layers. So right now you have two layers, the background pic and the layer with you pasted into. Make a new hue and sat adjust layer Layer>adjustment layers>Hue and Saturation. Leave the defualt settings and click okay. Then select the layer in the layers panel and hold the alt button. Move the cursor between the AdjLayer and the one you copied into until it turns into a circle thing and then click. This will make the adjustment layer only affect that layer. Double click on the adjustment layer now to bring up the Hue /Sat options.

    7. This is where you'll need some finesse and quite frankly sometimes the two images you're using just wont work together. The goal is to play with the settings to get part of the skin tones to match as closely as possible. I say some because a lot of times youll get a gradient in the light that doesnt match up. In other words, one of the images will be lighter on one side and darker on the other while the other image is consistent. I tend to only use hue for a couple of points, while sometimes Saturation and/or Lightness sometimes will be in the +/- 40s or 50s. Just mess with it till it looks good for an area (generally a half).

    8. If the skintones match for some but not all at this point, youll need to make another adjustment layer to correct the rest. Follow the same steps as in 6 to do that, then use step 7 to match the other part. Dont worry about what its doing to the good side you just did - the reason were using adjustment layers is so you can clean that up.

    9. So now you should have 2 adjustment layers affecting the layer you copied into, one that matches one side and another that matches the other side but probably makes the first side look shitty. There are two options to fix that. The best way to do it is to use a black and white gradient to mask a side of the second adjustment layer. This will look smoother. If you dont know what I just said read up a little bit on layer masks. The other option is to get a big eraser and set the hardness to 0 and start erasing the side thats masking the first adjustment layer.

    10. If you really cant get it to look right all the way through either pick a different stock photo or use another adj layer.

    11. At this point it should look okay but youll probably be able to see all the edges around the copied layer. So now we need a big eraser, I usually use around a 35 or so for most but it depends on the size of the image and how you selected to begin with. Set the hardness to 0. Thats important. Set the hardness to 0. Now go around on that layer (NOT THE ADJUSTMENT LAYERS) and barely touch it with the eraser so it makes a nice smooth transition of skin tones all the way around.

    12. After all that it should look pretty good, the only thing I usually do at this point is maybe drop the opacity of the layer to 80 - 90. This will help mesh the skin tones by letting some of the original0 image's skin tone come through.

    detritus 0Permalink
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