Beginners guide. General.

Here is my first photoshop guide for making fakes. Disclaimer:

 I am by no means an expert since I am entirely self taught, but I think my techniques are fairly easy for others to pick up. We will see how it goes.

I always operate under the idea that less messing with a photo=better pic so don't expect a guide that involves a lot of filters and heavy rendering. Its all about making it look as natural as possible with as little effort as possible. However, seeing as these are my first guides I am bound to make mistakes and oversights on things which are now second nature to me. Please feel free to inform me.

Also, fake at your own risk. When faking celebs you will almost always be using both a photo of a model and a photo of a celeb which you do not own. If you are ever contacting by a content owner of either you are obligated to honor their wishes and remove pic.

So here is goes. First one will be very simple and easy.

#1

The first thing you need to do is choose a pic. I personally have a library of pics of celebs and models (segmented into themes such as solo, duo+, non nude, etc). I generally just browse my porn pics until one strikes me as doable then I find a celeb that would work with it. However, there is no “right way” to do this.

There are several factors that determine what celeb and porn pics work well together. Here's is a rough list of the priority system for choosing a pic.

1. Face Angle – This is paramount. The more your celebs face is off from the other pic the harder EVERYTHING else become. Look at the nose, ears, eyes, and chin. Neck can be important depending on the pic, but generally its jawline up that matters.

(stupid auto formatting)

2. Shadows – You can remove shadows and highlights but making them is far harder. If you choose a pic where the celebs pic is lit on the right while the models body is lit on the left its going to look weird and be impossible to fix in any pic where you are using something other than a face shot where the celeb is looking straight forward. (for this first guide ignoring this one just so you can see results)

3. Rendering – If you can tell one photo has been heavily edited already and has unnatural colors/highlights it will make everything else harder.

4. General Skin Tone – Its essentially the problem of flat light vs natural light. An indoor pic is almost impossible to match well to an outdoor pic taken on a sunny day.

5. Color – The least important factor. Most coloration problems you can fix (though the further you have to go the longer it takes to make it look natural.

#2

Here are the pics I chose for this guide. You can work on your own pics or try to mimic my pic.

#3

Open both pics in photoshop. First thing you need to do is look at the angles of the face. In this case the angles are the same but opposite. Go (top menu bar) Image>Image Rotation>Flip Horizontally. (Always flip the model. Faces are NOT symmetrical and it can make the celeb unrecognizable) I recommend that you always do this before you put celebs face in the pic. Much easier to rotate at this point.

#4

Now to take the celebs head shot and put it in the photo. There are a number of tools that I use depending on the pic. The ones I use most often are (all in the left toolbar) the Lasso Tools, and Magic Wand Tool. There are a number of other ways as well, so do whatever you are comfortable with.

Select the Magic Wand tool. (If it is not there right click the quick selection took and change it to magic wand.) In this pic the background is a consistent color which is different than the face so should be no problem selecting it. You should always use this tool when possible because it will produce the best lines around the hair.

(Also when selecting remember. Holding down SHIFT = Add to the selection ALT = Subtract)

Holding down shift, use the magic wand to to select the background on the left and right sides of the face. If some areas are only partially selected keep using the Magic wand to click in those areas until it is all selected. If you find that the wand is also selecting sections of the face or hair you may need to adjust its Tolerance which is found above the image. (mine is set to 30)

(Helpful hint: You will make mistakes. Use Ctrl+Alt+Z to undo changes back several steps (or Ctrl+Shift+Z to redo if you change your mind) whenever something doesn't turn out right. Don't get frustrated. I would be shocked if I use that less than 50 times on any one photo.

#5

You should now have most of the background selected. Use Select>Inverse (top menu bar) to change it so its selecting the opposite of the background. Now right click on the Lasso tool and select the regular lasso. You use this tool whenever you need to make broad selections or minor refinements. Holding down alt, make big circle on the pic to deselect all all areas not near the face (do not want to inadvertently deselect sections of the head)

On this photo I felt comfortable using the lasso to deselect everything other than the face and neck. Just make sure to preserve as much of the neck as possible.

If you ever make a mistake. CTRL ALT Z. Can't stress this enough. Even I had to do that while doing this section. Eventually it will become second nature.

#6

Now with only the face selected click Ctrl+C (or you can copy past from Edit Menu) to copy the selection. Click over to the image of the model. Then click Ctrl+V and whala....the face should appear.

With the face now on the screen select the selection/transform tool (left menu) and (while always holding SHIFT to preserve the faces shape) shrink it down to a size close to the models. (make sure show transform controls is selected in top menu or this won't work.) Also make sure you have the face layer selected. Always keen an eye on layers as they are very important. (when rotating the face you will need to stop holding down shift)

Helpful Hint: When trying to match face sizes put the celebs face next to the models and adjust the angles and size until the eyes, ears, and chin match. If you are struggling just put the face over the models and change the opacity in the layers menu (right menu) to 50% while you match them.

Once you match the size put it over the top and line up the ear and jawline. (when changing size you have to accept the transformation. I like doing this by simply clicking on selection tool again and accepting transformation)

#7

Now that the faces are pretty much lined up in terms of size and position it is time to make the necks blend together. For this I use the eraser tool. First select the eraser tool from left menu. Change the Opacity to somewhere between 25-50% (lower the easier but slower) and make sure you have the hardness of the bush set to 0% (this makes for a smooth transition). Also adjust brush width to about ½ the width of the neck area that you will be blending.

Now zoom in on the face using the magnifying glass tool (alt to zoom out shift to zoom in). (hint: holding down spacebar lets you click and drag around the image while using any number of tools. Very useful.) Using the eraser start at the bottom of the area we are blending together and erase the edges. Working your way up keeping in mind that the bottom will need to be 100% erased by the end while the top of the area you will probably only need to go over once. Remember to undo immediately if you erase more than you need to.

Once you have a nice blend where there will be no harsh edges we can move on to matching the color.

#8

There are a number of very useful tools to adjust coloration. They are found under Image>Adjustments. The ones I use most are:

Beginner Friendly (and very necessary):

Brightness/Contrast

Vibrance

Color Balance

Shadows/Highlights

Selective Color (I don't use this at all but some find it VERY useful)

Advanced (can screw up images fast if you aren't careful):

Curves

Hue/Saturation

Selective Color

Pretty much all the other tools are useful as well....but I don't use them much.

READ THIS: Tweak, tweak, tweak. There is no one step solution to color and tone matching. All I can say is try many different things. I would recommend right clicking on the layer you are working on and duplicating it (then click the eyeball next to it to hide) so if you royally screw it up you can go back and reset it. This is one area where I can't tell you how to do it right. Practice and learning what each tool does is the only way..

For this pic I notice that the colors are simply much brighter in the face shot so I am I going to start out using vibrance tool (does pretty much the same thing as saturation except much safer because it goes in smaller increments). Just get close to what you think is the right vibrancy. Can always come back and tweak.

#9

I notice that the face is far brighter and has less shadows than the body. So I open brightness/contrast. I increase the contrast because it will brighten the bright areas while intensifying color and the shadows. I also decrease the brightness in general so it more closely matches the body. Keep ignoring the color itself.

#10

Now I am fairly happy with the overall balance of brightness in the pic so it is time to look at color again. Reopen Vibrance and adjust it until the color intensity matches. I only decrease it 20 and may need to come back again later.

Now open the color balance tool. The pic is fairly tan, which is yellow and red so I decrease both. After I get it where I want it (make sure not to go too far on any adjustment. Go as far as you can without making pic look odd). Then I readjusted brightness/contrast again.

Helpful Hint: I tried several other methods for this pic before making guide. Feel free to try other adjustments in the menu. There is almost always more than one way to do anything.

#11

At this point I decide that the body and background and far too shadowy and the angles are different than the face which is something that I cannot match. Therefor I want to decrease the shadows in the pic overall. So I open Shadows/Highlights and play with the shadows option until I think it matches the face (I prefer to mess with the body as little as possible but in this case it makes it much easier). You do this by clicking the background layer in the layers tab. If you haven't done this already, right click the background and click "duplicate layer" to copy the layer. Then select the copy and make your adjustments.

After I have adjusted shadows I see there is still a problem with the face having more color than the body so I adjust vibrance again. Make sure that the face layer is selected in the layers tab.

After this change I notice that the brightness of the face is now too dark compared to body. So yay TWEAK brightness up a bit until it matches.

(I also make one last minor color adjustment which I will not show. Just some color balance tweaking. I also used stamp tool to remove the hair poking out from model behind the face but thats another lesson me thinks)

WHALA!. I Throw on my watermark and finished.

Keep in mind that this was a very simple image and hopefully I have time to make tutorials for much more complex fakes later on. It took 3 hours to make this guide so chances are in the future guides will not always include the basics I talk about in this guide.

PLEASE GIVE FEEDBACK. IF YOU GET STUCK ON A STEP ASK ABOUT IT IN COMMENTS AND I WILL TRY TO SOLVE YOU PROBLEM AND ADJUST GUIDE!