Selections Part 2 cont...

For my second picture I wanted to try to put my face onto someone elses head. It was a much more difficult task than anticipated but I like the results. It also allowed me to use some of the lessons learned in the last chapter to make the image more realistic.

I choose a picture of Conan the Barbarian, I know being humorous was not part of the assignment, but I felt comfortable enough with the material that I could make a humorous image with relative ease. Throughout the process of making this image, I decided to take screen captures, since I am a very visual-oriented person, looking at these helps jog my memory on the steps I took, and also allows people to visualize the process as reading.

Let's start off with my picture and the picture of Conan, who is played by current Californian govener and long-term movie star, Arnold Schwarzenegger.





The first step I took was to remove my face from the image. I flipped it horizontally and used the magnetic lasso tool to select a similiar edge to Arnold's face.



Refining the edge, I made it more round, removed the feather and took away any 'radius'. This made a clean 'cut' and allowed me to past the image right onto the face.



Using the opacity feature again, I lined up my faces features and Arnold's, making a decent match. Because of our actual face proportions I slightly stretched my face vertically to make it appear more realistic. Ideally, I could have cut my face out identical to how his was, matching with the shadow, but I found a sort of 'work around' I'll discuss later.



Our skin tones are way off. (That lack of Juneau sun really shows!) so I altered the curves, as well as the color balance to make them more similiar. I find out here that matching skin color can be extremely hard. I now understand a reason behind the 'dancing images' being black and white. I also used the smudge tool to slightly blend under my chin and on the side of my head.



I added some noise to the image next, to make our skin texture more similiar.



The final step I wanted to take was to make the lighting on my face more similiar to that in the original image. Because I didn't include the 'face shadows', I wanted to darken the back of my face and increase the brightness on the front. This feature is extremely easy to use and helps in making depth in the image.

I am fairly happy with the results. Because of my troubles with matching the skin tone I also converted it to black and white just to see what it looks like. The images are juxtaposed below.