Eleven years ago in 2013, I showed you a
method to swap faces in Photoshop using the Auto Blend Layers feature.
It's a great automatic technique, and I still see people teaching it today.
But can we get better results using manual adjustments in the new generative AI?
Let's find out.
These are the two images we're going to work with.
The first step is to make a selection out
of the face you want to place onto another head.
There's a lot of ways of doing that in Photoshop.
One way is to simply use the Lassel Tool and freehand a selection around the face.
Actually, I'm doing a whole lot more than the face.
Always get more than you need.
That way you have some flexibility in case things don't go right.
I'm going to copy this by pressing CTRL+C,
and I'm going to go into the other tab and press CTRL+V.
V to paste.
Obviously, this is a much larger image, and that's good.
Before I do anything, I'm going to rename
the layer, and I'm just going to call this layer, face.
That way we know what we are working with.
Then I'm going to right-click on this
layer and convert it into a smart object, which will allow me to scale it up and
down as much as I want without losing any resolution.
To scale, you can press CTRL+T, then use
the transformation handles to make it smaller.
Depending on your settings, you might have
to hold the shift key to keep the scale constrained.
Place the face next to the new head, then
bring the Opacity down to about 50% or so to see the background below.
Then place the face over the new head.
Now we're going to use the reference point to align these faces.
By the way, if you see the reference
point, click on this checkbox on the options bar to enable it.
Then drag it to any place you want to use as a reference.
I'm going to use the chin as a reference, and I'm going to hold Alt and scale up.
That way, I scale from that reference point.
Depending on your settings, you might also have to hold the shift key.
Just make sure the eyes, mouth, and all
major facial features line up as best as you can.
The head tilt is slightly different on
these images, so I'll do my best to match them as best as possible.
It will not be perfect, but that's okay.
Sometimes you have to right click on the layer and choose Warp.
This will help you distort the face to match it to the head below.
In this case, it's not necessary to make any further adjustments, but in your
projects, you might need to spend a little more time on this step.
When you're done, you can just hit Enter
on the keyboard to commit the changes and then change the Opacity back up to 100%.
Then hold Alt and click on the layer mask icon to create an inverted mask.
This black mask makes everything invisible.
Now we can bring back anything we want by painting with a Brush Tool.
All you need to do is select the Brush
Tool and make sure that white is your foreground color.
And under the brush settings, make sure you have a hardness set to zero so you're
painting with a soft brush and increase the size.
I like to use keyboard shortcuts.
The keyboard shortcuts for adjusting the brush size are the bracket keys, which are
found to the right of the letter P in North American keyboards.
And to increase or decrease the hardness, you the shift key and the bracket keys.
Tapping on the left bracket key decreases
the hardness and tapping on the right bracket key increases the hardness, as you
can see from the preview here in the options bar.
So I'm going to paint with white to reveal the original image.
The auto blend layers technique I shared
with you back in 2013 was great at color matching, but not so good at matching the
facial features that give a person their identity.
For example, these people have different shaped chins, so I want to keep the
original and it in to maintain realism in this composite.
This is why I'm painting it in with the layer mask.
If you come across problems like here
where the neck is different sizes, no worries.
Leave it as is.
We'll blend it in later with the generative fill.
Before I paint the rest of the head, I'm
going to do a little bit of color matching.
We're going to do it manually so that we can have total control.
The previous technique didn't give you total control.
It was good, but if it missed, then you were stuck.
I'm going to show you how to do it manually.
To do it manually, I'm going to go into
the adjustment layer icon icon and choose the Curves Adjustment Layer.
Then you can click on this icon or press
Control Alt G, which is what I prefer to create a clipping mask.
That means that this adjustment layer will only control the layer directly below it.
This is what this arrow represents.
Also, you don't have to do this.
I like to do it as a habit of mine.
I'm going to delete the layer mask because we don't need it, and I don't like to have
layer masks if they're not controlling anything.
I'm going to expand the panel just a bit so I can see the properties here.
What I'm going to do now is adjust the colors so that these match.
The first step is actually not to match
colors, to match the brightness of the image.
I know it might be a little difficult to see.
One way of seeing brightness is to remove
the color so it doesn't become distracting.
I'm going to create a human saturation
adjustment layer and just desaturate the image.
You'll notice now that our new face is a bit brighter than the original.
So what we can do is darken it up a bit.
So you can click and drag on the Curves Adjustment Layer on this line to make
something darker by dragging down or making something brighter by dragging up.
You can think of it like a dimmer switch at home.
The light will get brighter or darker if you drag up or down.
So that's what I'm doing here.
I'm going to drag down and try to match the brightness as best as I can.
It's not going to be perfect, but it's better than before.
This is before and this is after.
Much, much better.
Also, I'm We're going to change the blending mode from Normal to Luminosity.
Look at the difference. Normal and Luminosity.
With Luminosity, we make the pixels darker
without adding any saturation, which is key.
Then we need to do a little bit of color matching here.
What we're going What I'm going to do now is create another Curves Adjustment Layer,
and this Curves Adjustment Layer is going to take care of the color.
Let me show you how this works.
I'm going to go into the drop-down here.
I can choose between red, green, and blue.
If I select the With the red channel, I
can click and drag up to add light in the color of that channel.
I'm adding red light.
Clicking and dragging down gives you the opposite color, which is cyan.
And with the green channel, if I drag up, of course, I get green.
I drag down, I get magenta.
With the blue channel, I can drag up to
get blue and drag down to get the opposite color, which is yellow.
I'm going to click on this icon to clip this to the layer below.
Again, I'll delete the layer mask because we don't need it.
I'm going to do a little bit of color matching.
I see a lot of green tints in this image,
so I'm going to introduce a little bit of magenta.
I'm going to go into the green channel and
drag down to introduce a little bit of magenta.
Just doing that alone makes this so much better.
I can go into the red channel and maybe add a little bit of red.
In the blue channel, I might reduce the blue and add a little bit of yellow.
Just by doing that, I made a huge difference in the color.
Everything is editable.
I can continue editing if I want.
For example, I can go back into this layer and maybe brighten the layer a little bit.
It was just a bit too dark.
That's the advantage of working with adjustment layers.
You have total control and flexibility.
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Now, I can go back into the layer mask here with my Brush Tool active.
I'm still going to paint with white to continue revealing these pixels.
I'm going to reveal the pixels here that show his hairline because I
think that will make everything much more realistic.
And notice that we have some issues here
on the neck that we're going to fix, and we're going to fix the hair in a moment.
Now, this is like an advanced thing, but I do want to mention it.
You can see that with this adjustment layer, we were making pixels darker.
If we wanted to not affect the darker pixels, we can double click to the side of
the layer, and that brings up the layer style window.
If I drag this black point to the right, it will not affect the darker pixel.
See that? But the transition is very harsh, so you
can hold Alt, click, and split it in half to create a smoother transition.
This
just makes it so that it doesn't apply the darkening effect to the darkest pixels.
Also, if you wanted to, you can create a
layer mask and paint with black to hide the effect.
I'm reducing the brush size by tapping on the left bracket key.
Then if I tap on the X key,
black becomes the foreground color, and I can paint with black to reveal that eye.
It's not as dark.
And here's another pro tip.
If you hold CTRL, Shift, F, you'll bring up the Fade command and you
can reduce the last adjustment that you applied.
See that? See how it's affecting that eye?
So maybe at about 49%, and I can do the other eye.
If 100% is too much, well, you can press Control, Shift, F to bring up the fade
command and reduce it a little bit and press okay.
And of course, your image is different and
it might require different adjustments, but you can always use blend if and layer
mask to make the adjustments that you need.
When you get to this point, you can use
generative Fill to fix the areas that are not blending well.
First, I'll create a new layer and I'll
bring my taskbar in, which was hiding on my second monitor.
Then I'll press the L key to enable the
Lasso Tool, and I can freehand the selection over the areas that are not
blending well, like on the top left of his head around the hairline.
Then all I need to do is click on
Generative Fill, leave the prompt blank, and press Generate.
Photoshop will now attempt to blend those two areas using AI.
As you can see, we get three variations.
We can click on them from the Properties panel and see the one that we like best.
In this case, I'm liking the first one best.
If you don't like it, you can just click
on Generate again and get three more variations.
The next thing that I'll fix is the neck right here.
His original neck is much thinner than the
bodybuilders, so they were not matching here.
But with Generative Fill, I can once again
leave it blank, click on Generate, and we can get a generation that fixes the neck.
In this case, I think I'll go with the second one.
Also, here's a pro tip.
Consider compositing in the ears from the
original image onto the face swap image to make it more believable.
Sometimes the ears are a dead giveaway that your images are not real.
And this is my result.
Let me know down below what you think about this manual method.
Thank you so much for watching.