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Morphdogen — Scarjo Faceoff
Published: 2016-07-18 05:58:30 +0000 UTC; Views: 9393; Favourites: 101; Downloads: 101
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Description
I have made no secret of my love for this terrific celebrity morph by TC2:So when I was tasked with doing a Scarlett Johansson morph for our FemaleMuscleMorphs female celebrity poll winners morphdown (stay tuned), I looked at that picture and thought, Hmmm...there is some similarity between those two lovely young ladies. Furthermore, I am a huge fan of this guy's work: ruberboy28.deviantart.com/ He happens to do the most consistently flawless face-swap images I have seen so far. And he was kind enough to tell me how he does it.
Now ruberboy28 uses photoshop, and the tutorial he pointed me to was a photoshop tutorial. I use GIMP, and was anxious to see if I could 'port those techniques over to my program. GIMP may not have all the bells and whistles of photoshop, but proprietary software is not the only way to get the job done. I am still learning how to do good face-swaps (which are not to be confused with whole-head swaps), but I am pretty satisfied with how this one turned out. And I did not even use GIMP's most powerful compositing tool, the G'mic filter, because I have not learned how yet.
Let me know in the comments if you think I should stick to writing celebrity girl articles and leave the morphing to the pros!
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Comments: 5
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Thanks again for mentioning my morph.
I think it's a good start for having used GIMP on a PS tutorial. In terms of color match, it was definitely spot on. You can see some discoloration on the top part of Scar's face with the swapped face on the bottom and there are some hard edges on the upper right corner.
- In general, I try to replace the entire section of the face so that I don't have to worry about the hard edges. This is why for the face swap I did, I put Anna's head over Julie's entire head so that I wouldn't have to fight with the skin tones of the face or use a blurry brush to soften the edges but create an artificial look. It's totally doable but more of a pain in the ass.
- The next thing is that the angle of ScarJo's face is a little off. It seems crooked and doesn't really match the angle of the crab pose. Again, at least for me, selection of the right photo at the right angle is the most important and laborious part. Yes, you can make most photos "work" but if you want to sell the illusion, having something that matches the direction of the face will generally work out better.
- The hair probably should have been replaced. I know it would have been a pain in the ass because of the hair that I placed on the photo already, but because ScarJo is such a recognizable celebrity, you can tell that the hair does not belong to her and doesn't even look like a wig. She doesn't have a hairline like Anna does and tends to keep her hair more wavy (and more blonde). So when you see Anna's hair over Scar's hair, it just doesn't seem right. Again, it would be a pain in the ass to remove the hair without redoing the morph from the original Julie Bourassa photo, but that would have been my choice for the head swap.
- Lastly, I always add subtle details to the photo in order to make it look convincing. In the swap that I did, I added white highlights to Anna's eyes with the pencil tool so that it looks like a camera with a flash took the photo. This matched the overall lighting of the original picture and helps it looks more believable. Without the highlights in ScarJo's eyes the suspension of disbelief starts to crack. I also lightened Julie's overall skin tone and removed any age spots, pimples, and most moles to better match Anna's complexion.
Again, it was an admirable effort and I'd certainly encourage you to keep practicing on more photos and possibly starting some from scratch so that you have more control over the final look.
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See, this is one of the things that really impressed me about you when I first saw your original morph. I loved your willingness to talk in great detail about how you made your picture, and here you have gone into great detail about what I could have done better when I altered it. Which I am grateful for because you are absolutely right in your analysis. In some ways doing a face-swap like this is harder than doing a whole-head swap (which is what I usually do in all of my morphs), but I have little doubt that, if done well, a face-swap can look more convincing. Ruberboy28 has mastered it!
I was absolutely trying to "shoehorn" this face into that spot. I thought I had made a good choice of pictures to use, until I got well into the process, and realized I had problems. I even used the perspective tool to alter the angle of the face at one point, without total success. And what you said about the eyes jumped out at me when I was clicking back and forth between the two images near the end of my process. I kept thinking that Scarjo's eyes were so much darker, and just passed it off as heavier makeup. But now I know what I should have done to make it better. (And may yet do--I often make minor edits on my images after I post them because the more you look at something, the more you tend to see.)
The hair is probably the most embarrassing blunder. You know, actresses change their hair all the time and I have seen plenty of Scarjo pictures where she has dark hair--only it is much wavier, as when she is playing Black Widow in a Marvel film. Yikes!
Thank you for taking the time to look at my picture and give me your invaluable feedback.
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