My guide to making photomanipulations V2.0

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OdysseusUT's avatar
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It's been a while since I wrote my first guide to photomanips and since then, I've employed a few different techniques in my latest works. I don't have a proper tutorial with screenshots of each step, but here are the steps I generally follow to create my photomanips (I use Adobe Photoshop CS6):

Step 1:
Get a photo of someone you want to manipulate and once you have that, start looking through the stock photos and photography sections for a photo of an animal, but make sure that the lighting conditions and angle that the photo is taken at are similar in both photos. You may need to use more than one photo and take elements of each for different areas of the face/body. Always make sure you read the rules for the stock photos or get permission if the photo isn't stock photography and ALWAYS give credit to your sources. See below for good places to find source images.

Step 2:
Copy the animal's face onto the model's face and lower the opacity of the layer

Step 3:
Use 'Free Transform' tool to resize and rotate the animal's face to fit the model's face better. You can use the puppet warp or liquify tools to make finer adjustments. I have started using the puppet warp tool more these days as it doesn't destroy the detail as much as the liquify tool.

Step 4:
At this point you may want to duplicate the layer of the model and smooth out their face (essentially make their face flat as if they don't have a nose). The patch tool is handy for this, but simply using the eyedropper and painting in the face works just as well. I sometimes smooth out the upper lip too. This is also a good place to start when applying shading for a muzzle if you plan on putting a muzzle on the model.

Step 5:
On the same duplicated layer of the model, I usually take the smudge tool with a small brush size (width of a strand of fur) and drag out the edges of the face and body. If the background looks smudged, add a Layer Mask and use a large black brush to go around the edges, careful to remove the smudged background, but also careful not to remove too much of the skin that has been smudged out to create the fur effect.

Step 6:
If the fur of the animal looks blurry, try running the sharpness tool over it, then use the smudge tool using a size approximately the same width as the larger strands/clumps of fur and smudge out the sharpness a bit. Play around with the strength of the smudge tool (I find 50-70% to be good).

Step 7:
Change the blending option for the layer that has the animal face. You may want to use multiply to darken the face. You may find it useful to duplicate the animal layer and play around with different combinations of opacity and blending options. Use Multiply to darken, Screen to lighten and Soft Light to add more contrast. You can also apply layer masks over each layer to remove areas where you don't think a bit of the screen or multiply layers are required.

Step 8:
Tidy up the picture using Layer Masks to remove unwanted portions of each image. Use the dodge and burn tools to lighten and darken areas as required. Pay attention to lighting and add shadows and highlights as required.

Step 9:
You may need to paint in fur to make the image more consistent. I don't think I've had a single photomanip where I haven't had to paint in some fur. Start off with a base colour, and then add darker and lighter layers. I personally like to use different layers for each colour of fur that I add. To draw the fur, I just use the dune grass brush, though there are far better ones around if you just do a search here in dA. You may find it useful to set the brush to paint in the direction/angle of the mouse strokes (you can set this in the brush settings).

Step 10:
Paint the lips/eyes/ears/teeth on separate layers as required

Step 11:
If the colour/saturation in any part of your photomanipulation doesn't quite match up with other areas, use adjustment layers to get them blending in better with the other layers. This is usually necessary if you're working with several different photos. I like to use the Hue/Saturation adjustment layers to modify the colours. If you add the clipping mask to the previous layer, it will apply the adjustments to that layer only. If you don't add the clipping mask, the adjustment will affect all the layers.

I also recommend checking out these helpful tutorials:
pythos-cheetah - pythos-cheetah.deviantart.com/…
Khedvu - khedvu.deviantart.com/art/Mani… (includes a full video)
shakealicious - shakealicious.deviantart.com/a… (Part 1) and shakealicious.deviantart.com/a… (Part 2)

Some useful places to find stock images and images that have been made available via a Creative Commons License:
DeviantArt - Stock & Resources
Flickr - Attribution, Share-Alike
Flickr - Attribution, Share-Alike, Non-Commercial
500px - Attribution
500px - Attribution, Share-Alike
500px - Attribution, Non-Commercial
500px - Attribution, Share-Alike, Non-Commercial

Let me know if you try it out! I'd love to see the result. Also, feel free to send me a note if you get stuck or need some help/advice :) (Smile)
© 2014 - 2024 OdysseusUT
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KrisFirebolt's avatar
You lucky people with photoshop. The fox girl looks beautiful