Many photographers do not like these things, but we must admit that they are fun and that the options are thousands. As always, it depends on the creativity of the person in front of the computer. Let’s get our hands on Adobe Photoshop to change faces, or whatever comes to mind, with this simple technique.
It is not the best method in the world for blending faces, but it is certainly the fastest and most efficient if the images are similar when it comes to lighting and textures. I have chosen two photos from JumpStory to follow the steps indicated in this YouTube video.
As always, I will follow the steps indicated, but I will try to contribute a step to make everything easier for everyone who wants to do this trick. It’s time to remember that movie called ‘Face to face’.
And we can always go to a mobile app -such as Photo Face Swap- that does everything for us and we don’t have to make an effort at all, like when we got our parents to do our homework on the last day of vacation.
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Merge faces in Adobe Photoshop
The first thing we need is to have two photographs with similar framing and lighting. I have tried different images and it has not worked correctly. If we want to do it like this we will have to work with adjustment layers and so on …:
We open the two photos in Adobe Photoshop. If we work with Adobe Lightroom it could be interesting to reveal them at the same time to achieve the same values in terms of temperature and exposure.
With the tool Ribbon we select the face that we want to paste on another body. It does not have to be as we see in the video. It only has to be adapted to the face where we will paste it.
With Ctrl + J we duplicate the selection on a new layer. This layer, with the help of the tool Move, we drag it to the file where we want to paste it.
Now is the time to adjust the size. It is more comfortable if we go to the window Layers and we lower the Opacity to correctly position the face on top of the new face.
In Selection> Transform Selection we adjust the new face to the portrait … It is important to place the eyes at the same height. Maybe we have to enlarge or reduce the crop … It all depends on the photography.
In some cases it will be necessary to right-click and choose the option Deform to improve the fit of the faces.
When everything is adjusted, in the window Layers we make Ctrl + click on the face thumbnail to recall the selection again.
Let’s go to the menu Select> Modify> Collapse and we put between 10-20 pixels. The selection will go inwards.
This step is important. We deactivate the visibility of the face cropped with the eye icon in the window Layers and we activate the other layer. Now we hit the key Delete (from the keyboard) and we remove that selection from the face.
To finish, we activate the visibility of the layer again, we select both with Ctrl + click and we are going to Edit> Merge Layers Automatically. In this window we do not have to change anything. Just choose as Blending method> Panorama and leave everything marked.
As you can see, the result is very convincing. The hardest thing is working with the right photos. It is a diversion with many creative possibilities. It sure can be done in a more professional way with frequency separation, for example. But if you find yourself not knowing what to do or want to make a joke on your friends or family, it will surely help you.