01. HS-BS Matching

The first thing to do is to find suitable HS (headshot) and BS (bodyshot), which is not always an easy task to do. I keep surfing and downloading regularly at the free sites and by now I collected rather large collection of HSs and BSs. I use ThumbPlus to find a matching pictures in this database. For this tutorial I chose HS of Courteney Arquette Cox with her husband, which makes the matching more challenging. Remember, HS and BS should share some similar features, such as a similar face angles, bone structures and facial characteristics. The colouring is not important at this stage.

The selection criteria for Courteney Cox BS:

1. High quality;
2. Matching face angle;
3. Dark hair;
4. Tight body;
5. Medium breasts size.

02. HS Extraction

There are many ways how to do this. You could use Freehand Lasso tool [L] or Magnetic Lasso combined with Feathering command [Ctrl+Alt+D].

However in Adobe PhotoShop 6, the improved Extract command [Ctrl+Alt+X] makes it easier to select difficult HS element such as hair.

With Edge Highlighter selected, chose relatively large brush. Draw a highlighting that covers both the HS hair and the background. Larger brush will allow you to draw this highlighting in one go.

For harder edges of face and shoulders tick the Smart highlighting option. The Edge Highlighter will now automatically adhere to the edges and reduce the brush size accordingly.

Use the [Ctrl] key to manually control the highlighting and the [Alt] key to erase the unwanted highlighting.

Now select the Extract command's Fill Tool and click inside the enclosed selected area.

Click the Preview button to extract the headshots.

03. Cleaning Up and Touching Up Edges

To clean up all the leftovers from the background use the Cleanup tool [C]. To be more thorough, zoom in [Z] and use a smaller brush. You can use the bracket [] keys to reduce or increase the brush size faster. You may also reduce the opacity of the brush by hitting the [1;2;3;4;5;6;7;8;9;0] keys for more or less subtle effect.

Using the Cleanup toll it is also possible to bring back missing bits by holding down the [Alt] key.

Remember that the hair should be partially transparent on the edges, so it will not contrast too strongly with the BS background. However for this tutorial I didn't have to clean up Courteney's hair properly as I'm going to use the hair from BS.

To smooth the face and shoulders edges use the Touchup tool [T]. It automatically removes the remaining mess and fills the missing pixels, so the edge looks more natural. Finally take one more look at the extracted HS, do some final refinements if you have to and click OK to finalise the extraction.

04. Transferring HS Layer into BS

Again there are several ways to do this. I will try to demonstrate 3 of them. But first open the recently extracted HS and the BS pictures. Now I would advice you to tile the images [Window/Tile], to get the overview.

1. Use the Move tool [V], click in the HS image and Drag and Drop it into the new BS. New Layer will be automatically created.
2. Open the Layer palette [F7], click in the HS picture and Drag and Drop the HS Layer from the Layer palette into the BS (see Screenshot on the right).
3. Click in the HS picture, hold down the [Ctrl] button and click on the HS layer in the Layer palette. The entire content of the layer will become selected. Now Copy and Paste in the BS picture[Ctrl+C; Ctrl+V]. Again the HS will be placed automatically into a new layer over the BS.

05. Preparing for Transformation

Before the HS transformation I had to put Courteney's and David's HS into separate layers so different formatting can be applied on them. But first, open the Layers palette [F7] and the History palette, which gives you better overview and more flexibility.

With the HS layer active using the Freehand Lasso tool [L] draw a rough selection around David's head. As there is nothing else in the layer except of Courteney's and David's heads you don't have to keep edges. Now go to [Layer/New/Layer via Cut] or press [Ctrl+Shift+J] to put David's HS into a new layer.

Name both layers respectively [Layer/Layer Properties].

At this stage I linked these two HS layers together by selecting the lower HS layer in the Layers palette and clicking in the column next to the Eye icon in the second HS layer. The 'Chain' icon will appear. This enables you to move and resize both HS layers at the same time. It was an appropriate thing to do in this case as I wanted to keep the heads' proportions from the original HS picture and prevent a mismatch. Note, that this also activates the Align Linked toolbar.

06. HS Transformation - Cox

Now about the actual transformation. We may start with Courteney, cause... lets face it, she is hot!!! ;-)

With Courteney's layer activated use the Move tool [V] to drag her HS over pornstar's face. Notice that David's HS moved as well as we linked both HS layers together.

If you want, you may reduce the opacity of Courteney's layer down to 50%. It might help you to find the proper HS-BS arrangement. And now the tricky part - the Resizing.

Go to [Edit/Free Transform] or press [Ctrl+T]. Shift-drag the corner handle of transform box to resize the HS proportionally or move the cursor to the outer site of any corner to rotate the HS. If you reduced the opacity before use the jaw line or the eyes as a guide. To finish the transformation simply press Enter.

Notice that David's HS resized as well. But that's OK, we wanted to keep the headshots' ratio as it was before.So far - so good.

07. HS Transformation - Arquette

OK, this is the point when we have to position and adjust the angle of David's HS. With David's layer activated, click off the 'chain' icon on the Layers palette.

Now we can move and transform [Ctrl+T] David's HS without affecting Courteney's HS. Position the HS and match the HS angle with the one of BS.

To do this you need to move the centre of rotation, the tiny cross in the middle of the transformation box, to rotate the HS around the neck area.

With both headshots in place, change the opacity back to 100%. and zoom out a bit.

OK, now, before you continue take a short break, make yourself a coffee, sandwich or something. And then take one looong look at the fake. Does it look right??? Not really, the heads are still damn big. Never mind, we will fix it later.

But first we have to get rid of all the excessive HS material.

08. HS Layer Masking

Layer Masks are probably the most powerful technique to hiding and revealing in Photoshop. The following part is the main contribution of this tutorial. I studied very very carefully every faking tutorial and I believe that the Masking deserves more attention especially as it is available also in Photoshop 5.

To get rid of all the redundant HS material fakirs usually use the Eraser, or they 'clone' the BS over the HS.

The main advantage of layer masking is that you will never again need to worry about accidentally erasing the hairline or jawline. Also the blending of the HS's skin and hair into BS picture will become more flexible and will look more natural.

OK, here we go...Once again we start with Monika, sorry, with Courteney first. To hide all the hair and neck parts, with Courteney's layer activated, click the Add a Layer Mask icon on the bottom of the Layers palette. A white square, the new layer mask will appear in the active layer. Activate the mask by clicking on it.

Now chose larger Brush [B] with soft edges, press [D] to set the default Black & White colours. Make sure the Black is the foreground colour if not press [X] to swap the foreground and the background colour.

With the layer mask still active start to paint over the Courteney's hair and neck. See... Everything in the mask painted with black will be hidden in the picture. If you accidentally 'erase' the jawline, no problem. Simply press [X] again to make the white the foreground colour and reveal the jawline again. Neat and effective, isn't it?!

But it gets even better. Now reduce the opacity of the brush. This is especially useful for the hairline. By reducing the opacity of the brush and painting over the hair you are partially revealing the BS's hair and partially covering the HS's hair. In this way you can experiment and create basically a completely new hair style for your HS. I believe this also is the most entertaining part of the whole process.

If you covered all the parts you wanted, zoom out again and do some final tweaking: move, resize or rotate the HSs. At this stage I usually resize the headshots proportionally down to 98%. I don't know why, but this number somehow works. Especially try and avoid the usual 'BIG HEAD' syndrome.

09. BS Remnants Retouching

That's right, the next thing to do is get rid of all the obstructing parts left from the BS. In our case it is the butterfly tattoo on the pornstar's chest, another tattoo on her ankle, the rims of the male pornstar's sunglasses and edges of his lips (the marching ants selections in the print screen snapshot ).

To cover these remnants a new layer has been created, I usually call it the 'Retouch' layer. Now, using the Clone tool [S] we will clone-draw similar areas from the BS to cover all the unnecessary bits. If you do all the retouching - cloning into a separate layer, it is much easier to do any corrections later and you want's mess up the original BS.

Don't forget to tick the Use All Layers option. Do all retouching before the colour transformation, it is much more difficult to do them after the colour adjustments.

To use the Clone tool you need to specify 2 different points

1. The area you want to use to cover the original HS [hold down the Alt key and press the left mouse key]. This will be indicated by a simple cross cursor.
2. The original HS area that needs to be covered. This is indicated by the circle of the chosen brush size.

Don't forget to save your work in the default psd format!!!

To learn more about Background retouching and Body transforming read Sank's Fakeology, especially the Salma Hayek's section, page 5 called 'Truncating the Shoulder Area'.

1. Fredd38's Underpainting Technique: You need to create a new layer between the BS and the HS. Change the HS layer to the Luminosity mode. Now chose a colour sample from the BS's face and paint on the empty second layer a colour spot all under the HS. The Luminosity mode of the HS layer will preserve only the light and dark information from the HS. The colour information will be taken from the second layer you just underpainted with the most characteristic BSs' colour. The disadvantage of this method is that you have to copy and paste eyes and lips into a separate layers, change the mode back to Normal, which might be tricky. Nevertheless many artists successfully use this method.

• You can keep all your colour & tonality adjustments on separate layers.
• You can modify any of this changes easily by reopening any of the dialog boxes later on when you need to.
• You can apply them to any specific layer (in this case to the HS layers) or apply them to all layers for better blending with BS.
• And finally, the adjustment layers don't alter the HS luminosity or colours information permanently. Any of this changes can be easily undone by simply deleting the unwanted adjustment layer.

3. Skin Make-Up Layer: I successfully used this technique several times. Create a new layer over the HS. Take a brush and paint a skin MAKE-UP all over the HS's face with the most characteristic BS colour. Erase all the excessive make-up from the eye, lips and nostrils. Change the layer mode to Overlay. Now keep playing with this layer. Try to change the layer opacity. Try to adjust the Hue, Saturation and Brightness. The adjustment of this layer combined with the adjustment layers applied to HS resolved for me the most desperate colouring problems in a simple yet effective way.

See the Spider-man worked example:

11. Fixing Tonality & Colours; Arquette

Ok, enough of the theory, lets get down to the business, shall we? Firsts I created New Layer Sets for both HSs and I named them accordingly [Layer/New/New Layer Set...]. Then I drugged and dropped both HS layers into those layer sets (see Screenshot. 10). The layer sets work in the same way as folders do. They will help me maintain the overview once the number of Adjustment layers will start to increase.

With David's HS layer activated I created new Hue/Saturation/Lightness adjustment layer [Layer/New Adjustment Layer...].

In the New Layer dialog box I ticked the [Group with Previous Layer] option to apply the adjustment setting only to David's HS.

To make David's face more red I moved the Hue handle slightly to the left. Then to make his face more dark I created Curves adjustment layer and I dragged the curves line slightly down.

Every once in a while I zoomed out, leaned back, looked at the fake from different angles to see if it looks right.

Then I started to fool around and experiment with different Adjustment layers, such as Colour Balance, Levels, Brightness & Contrast and Selective Colours until I was happy with the result.

12. Fixing Tonality & Colours; Cox

Before I started to modify the second HS I closed the David's layer set by clicking on the small triangle on the site of the layer set.

Now it's time to adjust Courteney's lovely face. This time I started with the Levels Adjustment Layer. I tried to apply the 'Auto' command, as often the outcome is perfect and only few more adjustments are necessary. It helped a lot also in this case, but even so in new Adjustment layer I boosted up the Contrast by 15 to 20 and at the same time I reduced the Brightness by the same amount.

The overall tone of pornstar's skin appears to be more yellow in comparison with pink tone of Courteney's skin. In the same way as before I created new Hue/Saturation/Lightness adjustment layer. This time however I moved the Hue handle slightly to the right to bring up the yellow tone.

If you forgot to tick the [Group with Previous Layer] option no harm done, apply new settings, confirm the changes and simply press [Ctrl+G] to apply the adjustment layer setting only to the HS.

I did also few minor adjustments to fix the highlight colours using Colour Balance adjustment layer. And again, it is up to your judgement to decide either you are happy with the result or not.

I did not like the overall colour saturation, the colours seemed too fancy and oversaturated. Yet another Hue/Saturation/Lightness was created and I reduced the Saturation values down by 7 to 10.

This time thou I did not group this adjustment layer to any other layer and I placed it on the very top of the layers palette so the effect has been applied to the whole picture. Now it looks fine to me.

13. Modifying Canvas, Creating Border

I usually keep the Canvas size at least 600 pixels wide and 600 pixels high. As the BS's height was only about 560 pixels, I went to [Image/Canvas size], then I pressed the top middle arrow and extended the height dimension to 600 pixels. A small transparent gap was created at the bottom of the image.

I created New Layer Set called 'Stuff' for all the finalising layers, such as logos, border, names and so on. Within this layer set I created new layer called 'border'. As like black borders I pressed [D] for default colour setting I pressed [X] so the black colour became the foreground colour. First I filled the gap at the bottom with black colour by selecting the gap using the Magic Wand tool [W], switching to the 'border' layer and pressing [Alt+Delete] to fill the selection with foreground colour. To make a simple black frame around the image select the whole image by pressing [Ctrl+A], then I go to [Select/Modify/Border]. I do 4 pixels but you might like something different. Then just fill in this selection with you favourite fill by pressing [Alt+Delete].

14. Typing Celebrities' Names

Chose the Type Tool [T]. Click on the screen and start typing. As soon as you start a New Text layer will be created. Type the names and if you want to add also some additional text, such as 'Hot Couple'. Make sure you spell the names correctly. You may use the attached list with names of 277 famous beauties, so all you need to do is Copy and Paste the correct name.

Now highlight the text and play around with the formatting, select font, specify size and chose any colour you want. The possibilities are mind-numbing so...go nuts.

Link the Text layer with the Border layer select Move tool [V] and use the Align buttons to place the text exactly where you want it.

For additional formatting I rasterised the Text layer [right click on the Text layer] and applied the Alien skin Eye Candy plugins, first Glass and then Smoke to make a soft steam evaporate from the text:

There are still some final touches, that can very easily improve the quality of your fake. I have however used only the firsts one for this one.

A) Sharpening: In the original HS Courteney's face was bit out of focus. To fix this, simply select the Courteney's HS layer, click at the miniature of her face (careful, do not select the Mask!!!) select the Smudge/Blur/Sharpen tool [R], specifically the Triangular icon (Sharpen tool), set the Brush pressure to about 30% and carefully bring out all the HS details (so called focus points) you want, such as eyes, lips, cheek dimples and so on. Then switch to BS to bring up some important details, such as ... nipples (they actually seem more titillated after few gentle touches :)

B) Blurring the background: Very simple technique to get rid of the unnecessary detail from the background and to make the characters pop out. Select the background with the Magic Wand tool [W] or Quick mask tool [Q] and using the [Filter/Blur/Gaussian Blur] blur the background and bring the characters into focus . Play with it to see what setting works best.

C) Softening the focus: Again very simple. Copy the entire image into a new layer (use the Copy Merged command from the Edit menu), blur this layer with Gaussian Blur and use about 5 to 10 pixels. Then reduce the opacity of this layer and keep experimenting until you get desired effect. Or you can leave the opacity at 100% but try to change the mode of the blurred layer to Overlay or Screen mode. To get rid of the hazy edges simply apply layer mask on the blurred layer and brush away-erase the blur from the important details and edges.

I have also created an imitation of Courteney's freckles on her chest in a separate layer. I used the Alien skin Eye candy-Water Drops filter set to brown colour and minimum glare. Then I reduced the opacity of the layer.

Always mark your work. Make up a nick name, create a simple logo and place it into a new layer somewhere in the fake. There are altogether 5 logos in this fake (damn my vanity! :)

1. Tattoo logo: Useful when there is not enough space in the background.
2. Free owl clipart.
3. Clipart, transformed and distorted with layer style applied.
4. Home made logo: Corel Draw drawing coloured in Adobe Photoshop.
5. Chines translation of my nickname: 'Mr Owl'.

17. Saving for Web

You can optimise fakes for viewing on the web by previewing your images in web format. Go to [File/Save for Web]. This option also gives you a 4-Up view so you can compare the file size and look of four versions of the same image before you actually save.

Use the standard name format for the fake images suggested by Lux Lucre:

celebfirstname_celeblastnameXX_artistfirstname_artistlastname.jpg

Chose high jpg quality (70-80) compression. When you save the picture for web, you save a copy of the file as it is at that moment, but you'll still be working on the original file, not the copy.Therefore don't forget to save your fake also in the default .psd format.

18. Posting

Now I can imagine that you can't wait to post your fake, the fruit of your work as soon as possible for everyone to see. My suggestion is: take your time. Wait until the next morning. The fake always looks different in the morning. And please-please: No BIG HEADS!!!

I went into lots of details in this tutorial, almost everything I learned about faking is included in these lessons. Nevertheless I made it for you so feel free to download this tutorial or even better print it out. And have fun reading it!!

Best wishes

Mr Owl

mrowl75@yahoo.co.uk