Photo Merging and Retouching
The first thing I look for when matching up a head to a base image is to choose two where the heads are facing in nearly the same direction. By this I mean both are facing full front or both are 3/4 shots, for example. I also look at the lighting. Unfortunately, most snapshots are taken with front-flash, so the lighting is straight-on. It would be very difficult to blend that kind of head with a base where there is distinct side lighting.
I decided to use my own head for this. I'm going to superimpose it onto Emme's body (world's foremost plus-size model).
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Both are facing directly into the camera and both have frontal lighting. I added a step here because Emme's photo is so tightly cropped. I went to Image > Add Borders, unchecked "Symmetrical" and set Top, Bottom and Left borders to 0 and the Right border to 100. This gives space to paste my head and work on a rough copy before moving the layer underneath.
I used the Freehand tool with it set to "Freehand" in the Tool Options Palette and made a rough selection outside the facial area of my head.
Then I clicked the Copy button. 
I clicked the title bar of emme.jpg to make it the active image and went to Edit > Paste > As New Layer. (I have toolbar buttons for these but since you might not, I'll just give the menu commands.) I used the mover tool and dragged my head over to the right a bit. Now emme.jpg looks like this.
The step that I take next varies by project. If there is a drastic difference in contrast between the two heads, I'll deal with that first. (A high-contrast image has a wide range of dark and light colours while a low-contrast image contains only midtones with no real highlights or deep shadows.) My head is of lower contrast than Emme's but since the difference is not great, I just waited until a later stage and then decided if I need to adjust the contrast.
The biggest problem with this project is the difference in the hues of the flesh tones. Emme's are a peachy yellow, while mine are bluish pink. I find that I can never just make one change to match the two images. I usually peck away at it, making small changes with different filters until I get close.
For the first go-round, I went to Colors > Adjust > Red/Green/Blue. I arranged my desktop so I could see both Emme's face and mine while the Red/Green/Blue dialog was open and I checked "Auto Proof" so I could watch the effect that my changes would have and could compare the two faces. The settings I chose were:
- Red: 13
- Green: 5
- Blue: -9
The blue tint has been reduced and a yellow tint now prevails. Just a side note here. If you click on a slider button to bring it into focus, you can use the right and left arrow keys to adjust the values one step at a time. Using the mouse to adjust it will usually cause a large jump in values and typing new values as you're trying to watch the effects is a pain.
I wasn't bold enough with my changes the first time. So I tried again:
- Red: 7
- Green: 0
- Blue: -5
Hm, now we're getting somewhere. I decided to resize this and put it into position before I made any more adjustments. It's at the point now where it's more helpful to have my face right where it will end up before making further corrections. Open up the Layer palette by typing a lower-case "L". Right-click on the "Background" layer button and click "Promote To Layer" from the popup menu. This will enable you to "erase" Emme's face and leave a transparent hole. (Pity!)
I zoomed in to 2:1 on Emme's face. Click on the Eraser tool and open the Tool Options palette if you haven't already done so by typing a small "o". I used these settings for the Eraser.
I used the Eraser to erase most of her face from just above the eyebrows down, like so:
I'd rather erase conservatively to start with as I can remove more after my face is in place and I can better see what needs to be done. Click on the Mover tool and use it to drag my face over the transparent hole. In the Layer palette, click and drag the Layer2 button so it's above the Layer1 button. This places the layer with Emme's face on top.
The first thing we have to do is rotate my face to align it with Emme's. Click on the Layer1 button to make it the active layer. Go to Image > Rotate to open the Rotate dialog. Make sure that "All Layers" is unchecked, click on the Left radio button and set a "Free" rotation of 32 degrees. Click OK.
Next we'll resize it. Go to Image > Resize. I set "Percentage of Original" to 125%. Make sure "Resize All Layers" is unchecked so that you're only resizing the layer with my head. The "Maintain aspect ratio..." box should be checked. Afterwards, I used the Mover tool to position the layer with my face on it and align it with Emme's. Now the image should look like this:
Making sure that Layer1 is still selected, go to Colors > Adjust > Hue/Saturation/Lightness. Reset all the values to 0 to start with and have Auto Proof checked. Again, make sure you can see the image as you're working to find the best values. I decided that the colours were too faded in my face so I thought I'd try increasing the saturation. I used a value of 30. I usually don't adjust hue from this dialog but I did give it a tweak and found that a Hue value of 1 brought the tone a little more in line. So now mine looked like this:
I took one more pass at the Red/Green/Blue settings:
- Red: 7
- Green: 0
- Blue: -11
Now THAT'S close! I find that it's not possible to reach this state in a more direct fashion. There are so many variables that you can tweak - Brightness/Contrast, Gamma Correction, Hue/Saturation/Lightness, Red/Green/Blue - and it's a progressive process. Another important area to keep in mind are the Sharpen options in the Image menu. You want to make sure that both images are similar in their levels of sharpness and it's usually the new face that needs sharpening. I'll usually try all three of the Sharpen options. Sometimes one will work better than the others. For this one the Unsharpen effect worked the best but it didn't seem to make much of a difference so I didn't apply it.
From this point on, I can only guide you in a general sense through the finishing process because freehand work is involved. The first thing I did was I zoomed in once more, clicked on the top layer (Layer2), clicked on the Eraser tool, reduced it to 5 pixels in size and changed the Hardness to 50. Reduced the hardness of the Eraser leaves a feathered edge where you erase. Then I removed additional parts of Emme's face. I left part of her forehead intact because hers is higher than mine and I would have uncovered my bangs at a lower point. Also, as I worked in close, I could see lots of icky green patches that resulted from the colour corrections. I tried to avoid uncovering those as much as possible with the Eraser and left Emme's tones there. I use small brush strokes rather than swooping around without releasing the mouse button. That way, if I uncover something I don't want revealed from the bottom layer, it's easier to undo just a small piece than all the work. I'll also zoom in and out near the end to check it "from a distance".
I uncovered as much of the forehead as I could until I ran into dark areas in my picture. I removed most of the left part (our left) of Emme's face but left a lot of the right part intact to cover the green discoloration. I left her ears too.
It's about time to merge the layers and do the touch-ups. Take a hard look at what you have and decide if it needs any further filtering and especially make sure that the alignment is correct before merging. You can always select the facial area after merging and apply filter corrections, if need be, but you're stuck with the alignment. It also doesn't hurt to make a backup copy of the unmerged image just in case you need to back track.
In the Layer Palette, right-click on either of the Layer buttons and select Merge > Merge All (flatten) from the popup menu. For the sake of the file size of the tutorial images, I cropped out the added border at this point.
I use a variety of tools to retouch images; primarily the Clone Brush, Paint Brush, and the Retouch tool in Soften mode. First I zoomed in at 4:1 on the forehead and activated the Retouch tool. Under the left tab in Tool Options, I used the following settings:
- Shape: Round
- Size: 5
- Hardness: 100
- Opacity: 100
- Step: 25
- Density: 100
Under the middle tab:
- Retouch mode: Soften
- Paper texture: None
"Sample Merged" isn't applicable here. I had "build-up brush" checked. I used the Retouch tool to blend the colours of the forehead(s). It also works well to reduce any shiny facial areas. Make sure not to get too close to the hair or eyebrows or you'll drag in the darker colour. To get in closer to these border areas, reduce the size of the brush even further. I set the size to 1 and tackled the part in her hair, purposely dragging adjacent darker colours into the area because I thought it looked too light. I also did a few touch-ups around the hairline with the smaller brush.
Next I tackled the area to the left of my glasses. I zoomed in to 6:1. I clicked on the Clone brush and set the Tool Options for the left tab to:
- Shape: Round
- Size: 3
- Hardness: 100
- Opacity: 100
- Step: 25
- Density: 100
Under the middle tab:
- Clone mode: Non-aligned
- Paper texture: None
I picked out a section of colour elsewhere in the face that I thought would give a good transition between the orange next to the ear and the highlighted skin next to the glasses. In other words, to replace that icky green. I decided on the darkest pink spot in the apple of my cheek. To use the Clone brush, right click on the source area (the cheek) and you'll hear a beep. In this case, I left-clicked three different times to dab the source colour onto the green area. Then I used the Retouch tool to blend it all together. I wasn't even going to attempt to try to "un-green" the area under the glasses. However, I decided to clone some flesh tones to the green area under the left eyebrow and blended that in.
I continued with the Retouch brush to run it over the shiny area just above and below the lower glasses rim and blended that in with the surrounding areas a bit. Now my copy looked like this:
Continuing to work counter-clockwise, I tackled the left part of the chin with the clone brush. I wanted to cover up that dark grey area. Here's what it looked like after I cloned some adjacent areas over the grey:
And this is what it looked like after I smoothed it out using horizontal strokes with the Retouch brush.
I made a mistake here, in retrospect. After I zoomed out, the area looked too flat. There should be a highlight running right through that area. So I cloned a lighter area into an arc and blended with the Retouch brush set to a size of 3.
The right side of the chin needed a total overhaul. This is what it looked like after I cloned in other areas from the face and neck.
Then I smoothed it all out, working from the light areas into the darker areas with a 3-pixel Retouch brush. I also smoothed over that red spot on the chin to make it less pronounced. Now mine looks like this:
That's the worst part of it out of the way. Next I moved on to clone over that awful blackish-green area on the right side of the face. I used colours from the area I just fixed and extended them upwards. I took care to extend the shading under the apple of my cheek upwards to the edge of the face too.
I discovered after smoothing that I should have also extended the highlight over to the far right so had to fix that. After that, my copy looked like this:
I wasn't really happy about the purplish shadows under the cheeks but rather than complicate things even more, all I did was soften them with the Retouch brush a bit. Then I zoomed in on the neck area to smooth out the irregularities in the skin left by the JPG compression. I generally will draw the cursor along the contours of the neck so as to smooth in the direction of like colours. I used the Retouch brush set to a size of 5. This is also the time to smooth out any uneven colour underneath the chin. I zoomed out to take a last look and decided there were some ugly dark spots under the eyes that had to go. It looked like mascara had run down (and maybe it was). I did some minor cloning to cover those and blended. I noticed that my teeth ended up pink, thanks to the JPG compression in the original photo, so I selected them, went to Colors > Adjust > Hue/Saturation/Lightness and set Hue to 0, Saturation to -30 (to fade the red) and Lightness to 9. I don't have a gap between my front teeth so I filled that in with a one pixel Paint tool and then removed the selection. To finish up, I used a 1 pixel Retouch brush to smooth out the blotchiness on the bridge of the nose and to slightly soften/darken the highlight on the tip of the nose.
Here's what I ended up with.
After the fact, when I was retesting some of this, I had a lucky accident. When I applied Hue/Saturation/Lightness settings of Hue: 0, Saturation: 14, and Lightness: 8 to the whole image, I ended up with this:
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I may look pale next to the original Emme but this is closer to my own colouring. I also think it has a more luminous quality to it. Normally, I try to match the new faces to the base image and when the image consists of other faces and backgrounds, it's pretty much a necessity. In this case, I probably could have adjusted Emme's colours as well as my own so that they met somewhere in the middle.
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