Advanced' Photo Effects Tutorials

A lot of people have asked me how I turned a one of our Admins into a lion in the Chop an Admin-contest. With some practice it is not hard at all and during this tutorial I will guide you through each and every one of the steps. After most of the steps I will link to a WIP so you can easily follow the changes.

First, you need to images that has somewhat similar angle and lighting. I used these two (which matches very well if you mirror the lion-pic):

Before I started with all the fur-job I decided to keep parts of the lips as they are to make it more human. But to make them fit I had to do a few adjustments. By desaturating it and playing with brightness/contrast and curves I tried to give it a look as if it could be placed on a lion without looking out of place.

Now comes the parts where you will see if the image will turn out well or not. By copying parts of fur from the lion and pasting on the face I slowly built up the image.



The key to succeed is to pay close attention that the parts you are pasting on are following the shape and features of the face.
A good idea is to copy parts from the lion and paste it on the equivalents on the face. The parts around the lions eyes should be pasted on the parts around the humans eyes and so on. There are exceptions (example: the neck on this image) but on the images I've made I found that around the eyes, nose, mouth and jawline it is rather crucial to use equivalent parts. Sometimes, using liquify or warp is needed to make the fur fit better.

Here's where we are now

The image sure is starting to look cool but there are still problems. One of them is that I've lost a lot of the facial features of the person I've lionized. I will recover those by using different blending modes.

I started by doing three copies of the original human-picture, desaturated them and placing above all other layers. Then I set them to different blending modes (tested mostly muliply, soft light, hard light and overlay) to see how well they brought back features. I decided to make one layer to bring back the hair-line, one for the eyebrows and eye and one for the general shape.



I've placed them in that order only to make it easier to see what is happening. In reality I first experimented with different blending modes, then adjusted with brightness/contrast, blur or whatever was needed and finally masked it.

At this point I had worked a lot with it and thought I might be a little blind to obvious faults. So I asked for some critique from one of our users. After a little talk we decided that it looked a little too much like a cute teddy-bear and not enough attitude for a lion. So I made the nose-part a lot bigger.
Simply by creating a new empty layer on top and then presses ctrl+alt+shift+E (my favourite shortcut) which makes an exact copy of all layers. Then I masked out the nose and transformed it a little larger.



If you're sitting there thinking "I can't see the difference from the last picture", open them both in different windows and swap between them. It's amazing how much difference such small changes can make.

To make it really believable I needed to have strands of fur pointing out from the edges of the face and neck, instead of it abruptly end like skin does. I also thought the fur needed some touch up around the nose cause it didn't flow very well. And under the mouth I wanted longer hair strands and I didn't think the hair-line integrated very well with the new lion fur. To sum up all those problems, I needed to do some fixes with the fur.
I did this by brushing in the hair by hand. If you own a tablet this will get much easier but even without it is fully doable. Personally I have no drawing skills at all, it's just to try to see where the fur should be and paint it there.
When having the brush selected, press "alt" to pick up a color and then use a very small brush at a high opacity to paint in strands of fur in that color.
This is all the fur I draw:

[Edited by Moderator on 7/24/2010 1:13:09 AM]

To end it all, I simply resized the image and sharpened it using smart sharpen. This gave me the final look of the image:

To sum it all up. There are lots of small details in this tutorial that all are useful, but when transforming a lion into a human the most important thing to think about is:
1. Find source pictures with similar lighting and angle
2. Be very careful when pasting on animal-parts to make sure they are following the shape and features of the human body or face.

If you managed to do that very well, you will get a really good image. Not only do it work only for faces, but whole body works just as well.

Next step will be to try the tutorial on turtles instead of lions.


[Edited by Moderator on 7/24/2010 1:15:06 AM]