Photoshoppery assistance required

[furQ]

Hi,

I know I'll probably get flamed and called a lazy git (or worse), but would love a bit of help getting something like image 1 (the gorgeous Annie Mac) looking something like image 2 (the nearly equally lovely Edith Bowman).







I have tried, honest!!!!  I just cant get it looking as good as that though.

Much thanks in advance for your charity...

[Shoulders?-Stomach!]

The woman in the top picture is much prettier than that pug-nosed hatchet face below with the annoying voice and even more annoying demeanour. Would you like instructions or do you actually want smeone to do it for you?

If you want some throwaway advice, I'd say that the filter effect on the below picture wouldn't work as well because it highlights facial detail which would be lot on the top picture as her face is too far away. If you can re-size it without losing too much quality then I'd crop it.

[susie]

I think S?-S! is correct. There's not enough detail in the small picture. I googled for a bigger picture, then ran that through the Live Trace feature in Adobe Illustrator.



You can fiddle with the settings to get more, or less, detail and colours.

[Lee]

In Photoshop it's the Posterize tool I believe. Then you can recolour it with the various colouring tools.

[JJJJH]

I'd do that process up there on a higher-resolution version of the image than was required, then scale the final image down to fit, so as to hide any signs of bitty pixels (plus it's easier to preserve any highlights and shadows you wanna keep the bigger the pic is).

[furQ]

thanks for the tips will spend way too much time perfecting my technique now!!

[Artemis]

A quick question from me, if I can hijack this thead. I might know this already but my mind's gone blank.

If you have two layers and you want to blend them seemlessly into each other like a gradient, how would you do it? Say you have the face of someone and you want to put it onto the head of someone else but their skin tones are different so you want to gradually build to the face's colour, how do you do that?

[JJJJH]

Masking'd be a quick way to do it. And it's non-destructive, too. (I love non-destructive techniques, me)

One way to get going with it would be to get the face layer, and go to Layer > Add Layer Mask > Reveal All. Then get a black brush, and carefully paint away with soft edges and faded pressure until you get a decent blend between the two. Or you could do the reverse of that, and paint the image in on top of > Hide All.

[sproggy]

You could blend the layers using the overlay mode, first ensuring you mask the parts on the top layer that are not required.

[Regular John]

Then piss about with Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation and Brightness/Contrast.

[mook]

http://www.worth1000.com/tutorial.asp?sid=160978&page=1

That's a good, easy to follow tutorial. Might be of some help to you.

[Artemis]

Great - thanks very much for your help, everyone.

[lazyhour]

Thanks a million for that link, mook!  I've been PhotoShopping for ages, but never knew what masking was or how to do it.  Now I do!  And it looks incredibly useful!  Huzzah!

[mothman]

Any idea how to do it in Paint Shop Pro?

Not that I'm cheap or anything, I actually have Photoshop, I just don't know how to use it.

[Artemis]

That was an extremely useful tutorial, thanks!

I managed to distract myself from work by blending Cheie Blair's face onto the Mona Lisa....

[mook]

Any idea how to do it in Paint Shop Pro?

Not that I'm cheap or anything, I actually have Photoshop, I just don't know how to use it.

As far as I remember, layer masks have been available in PS since version 5, so if you've got a copy of 5 or later then that tutorial should work. I don't know about PSP though, sorry.

[mook]

That was an extremely useful tutorial, thanks!

I managed to distract myself from work by blending Cheie Blair's face onto the Mona Lisa....

(picture)

Fuck, if I knew something like that would be created i'd have never posted the link.   ;)

If you go to www.w1k.com , then click on tutorials on the top right hand side of the page you'll find a rake more tutorials by the same people.

[lazyhour]

Wow, I'm so happy to have learned about masking.  I made this pointless image to celebrate my new skillz.



(original image)

It's not fantastic, I know, but for a first attempt I'm pretty happy.  Thanks again for the advice and links on this page!

[sick as a pike]

Well it's better than my effort after I did the same tutorial, but in turn mine is better then my usual efforts so I'm still pleased.



Me with my cat's eyes.

[Morrisfan82]

It makes you look like a goth George Clooney.

[mothman]

It fucking does, an' all. . .

[mook]

I've just found a small utility that makes colourising B&W images a doodle. Anyone who has ever gone through the process in Photoshop will know how time consuming and fiddly it can be.

It's only a very small .zip file (1.26 MB), doesn't require any PS knowledge (it's a stand alone programme, not a PS plugin BTW) and is well worth downloading and having a tinker with if you've got a spare ten minutes or so.

http://www.recolored.com/sa/sadl.php


A quick screengrab.

That took literally 2 minutes from start to finish.

I must admit the above result isn't as good as what can be achieved with PS, but all you have to do is draw a few squiggly lines over the image you want to colourise and then hit the start button.

[quadraspazzed]

^^^ That is fucking amazing! Cheers mook. ^^^