“Truth”

This past winter I have taken a huge interest in creating fine art images. It is my new love and it has gotten me energized and eager to shoot more. When I posted my latest creation “Truth” on Facebook, it sparked some interest in how I put the image together so I thought I would blog about it.

I always sketch out my ideas first. That way when I am shooting I know in advance what shots are needed to put the composite together. I knew in advance that I wanted her head to be facing the opposite direction of her body so I knew I needed two separate shots. One of the important things to remember when doing a head swap is that you do not change camera angle. This is where having a tripod would be super beneficial but I am cheap and just took extra caution not to move between setups, which was not difficult since I was lying on my bed. Thankfully my kid took direction really well that day!

These are the two shots I took.

I knew that I wanted my final image to have a square crop so I cropped it first to see how much of the background I needed to clone out and I was lucky to not have to do any work there. Next, I swapped her head from the one image and placed it on the other.

I first selected the area that I wanted to take from the one image using the lasso tool. Be sure to think carefully about this, you don’t want to have to try and line up wrinkles or really obvious areas. I took my selection up into the background quite a bit because I did not want to have deal with variances in the shadows on the wall. Once I had the area selected, I select my move tool and slide it over to the other image.

Now I have the head from the one image in the main image I will be using and it is in it’s own layer. I reduced the opacity of the layer to help line up the head with the body. Once I had the proper placement, I took it back up to 100% opacity and added a layer mask. I always use a layer mask to “erase” things from my images but quite often I miss things or forget sections and if you use erase tool it is sometimes harder to go back and fix later. I masked back all obvious lines from the “selected” area and I reduced the opacity of my brush in spots to get a seamless blend between the two images.

Once I got a seamless blend of the two images, I went on the edit my image. I changed her hair color by first selecting her hair with my lasso tool and feathering the edges. From the menu bar at the top, choose “Select”, then Refine Edge and then adjust the “feather” slider.

To actually change the colour of the hair, I went to Image from the menu bar, then Adjustments and finally Replace Colour. I adjusted her hair colour by changing the colour box in the “replacement” area at the bottom and adjusting the sliders until I found an effect that I liked.

I then finished up with my editing, nothing too special – I just played with some curves layers and lastly added a texture. I will be doing a blog post next week about textures and how I work with them so stay tuned! I also have a texture pack that I created and will be giving away.

And voila, here is the final image. I hope this helped or inspired someone to step out of their comfort zone and try something new!

Corrie Lindroos Photography