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How To Do Facial Photo-manipulation (Photoshop)

April 27th, 2007, Photoshop, General, admin, 0 Comments  Print This Post

A : In this tutorial I will Explain you how to manipulate a facial image and make it compatible for web. I will show you how to soften the skin, change the eye colour and brighten the teeth, and some other things. Here’s the picture we will be using:

First of all, we will remove the background. To do this we can use the lasso tool. Select the area around the person you are manipulating, but don’t try to be precise, we will sort that out later.

When you are done with selecting, switch to quick mask mode in order to make the selection more precise. Now what you need to do is “colour” the area that is not necessary by black colour and a brush of wanted size. This is the time when you should be as precise as you can. This is what you should get in the end:

While still in quick mask mode apply a Gaussian blur with radius of 1 pixel, in order to soften the edges we are about to cut. After you have done that switch to standard mode, invert the selection and delete the background.

Note: It’s best to do this on a new layer, so you don’t touch the original image.

Anyway, if you turn of the original layer, you should get something like this:

Now let’s move one to the skin. To soften the skin we are going to use a quite primitive method. First of all, apply a Gaussian blur of a certain radius so that the skin appears to be softer, but not unreal. In this case, I have used the radius 7. Now, you must open the history window, and select the small square next to the Gaussian blur. Then make a step backwards. What we are doing is applying the blur only to some parts, in this case the skin. Now, activate the history brush of the wanted size and carefully go over the skin. This way you will get the Gaussian blur only applied to the skin.

The result in my case is this:

And now - the teeth. This one can be done in an easy way, but you can complicate it a lot when you master face photo manipulation. I’ll do it the easy way. First switch to quick mask mode and select the teeth (be precise). After that copy the teeth to a new layer. There you can mess with the brightness and other options, that usually works. If it looks unreal in the end, feel free to change the opacity of that layer.

Here’s Ivana with new teeth:

Now we move on to the eyes. I will lighten the eyes a bit and change their colour to green. For brightening them, do the following. Create a new layer, and then go to Edit > Fill, and choose 50% gray. Change that layer’s mode to Soft Light and activate the dodge tool. Now use the dodge tool on the white part of the eyes to lighten it a bit. I suggest you experiment with this, since it is quite hard to do it right. The difference might not be noticeable, but it’s there.

This picture is not very high quality, so changing the eye colour wouldn’t be successful. If you want to change the eye colour, this is what you have to do. First select the eyes and copy them onto a new layer. Then desaturate that layer, and edit the curves for it. That way you will be able to set the wanted colour and it will look natural. In addition to that, you can adjust the opacity for that layer in order to make it more realistic.

What we can do now is beautify the eyebrows. You can do this in two ways. You can use the Smudge tool, or use the Clone Stamp tool. It is really up to you. If you are using the Smudge tool, make slow and gentle moves in order to hide that action. If you are using the Clone Stamp tool, select an area as close to the eyebrow as it is possible. I have used the Smudge tool and here is what I got.

And now, the final touch. Choose a random background that you find appropriate and put it in a new layer below the person layer. After that you may apply any effects you want. I have chosen a forest background and blurred it a little bit.

And here it is - what it looked like in the beginning and what it looks like now.

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How To Install Photoshop 7 On Linux (fedora) ?

April 27th, 2007, Linux, Photoshop, General, admin, 1 Comments  Print This Post

A : What you may need:

CD-Writer, (maybe)
Windows, (needed!)
Adobe Photoshop 7 CD (well, if you didn’t how could you do this?) (needed!)
A blank CD, (maybe)
A Printer, (maybe)
NTFS Access from Linux on Dual Boot machines (maybe)
WINE (needed!)

So first of all we need access to a Windows machine, I’m dual booting, with Windows XP and Fedora Core 3, I’ve also got NTFS access for Linux, so copying the files over wasn’t hard at all and is much quicker than the other methods I will suggest.

First install Photoshop 7 on C:, could be any other drive but we’ve got to change it to match C: in the registry information, so if you’ve already got an installation, like I had residing on H:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop 7 then not to worry as it’s quite simple to make the change.

Now that you’ve installed it, first run it once, just so registry information gets updated then close it. Now we have to go into the registry and export it. So open up the run dialog box by either Start | Run or WinKey + R and type regedit.

We should now be in the Registry Editor program, we must now look for \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop 7.0\ it should be highlighted we will now export it, export it to your documents as adobe.reg, now if you aren’t dual booting with NTFS access then still follow these instructions but I’ll tell you when you have to change it.

Right click on abode.reg and edit it, Select All the text (Ctrl + A) then Copy it (Ctrl + C).

Open up a new notepad document and Paste (Ctrl + V) and save as adobe.txt (why did we do this?, well it saves editting the binary, since this is what a .reg file is when exported, and I had to edit it with a hex editor on linux, so I’m saving you time by doing it this way)

Now the changes for those without dual booting or NTFS access, (this is however if you’re using NTFS, if you’re using FAT32 then you should be fine, however my scope does not cover mounting drives, etc, (maybe later) but for now it’s getting PS7 working)

You have two options, print out the adobe.txt file, which means you’ll have to type things in manually or copy it onto CDR in which I’m about to explain.

Let me explain what I’m going to do, I’m going to copy the contents of the /Program Files/Adobe/Adobe Photoshop 7 directory onto CD, other methods could be NTFS/FAT32 access to your drive and then copy it to the right location or burning this onto CDR and transferring it this way and even networking between PCs, I’ll leave it up to you, oh and if you’re not printing the adobe.txt file out, then also add that into your CDR.

So now we should have our adobe.txt file and Directory of Photoshop 7 somewhere, either on CD or on hard drive.

We boot back over into Linux, open up console and browse through our User Directory’s wine location which should be “~/.wine/c_drive/Program Files” here we create a new directory mkdir -p Adobe, we now copy the Photoshop 7 directory into “~/.wine/c_drive/Program Files/Adobe/” we then go back to the root of our wine location ~/.wine and edit the system.reg file, but first we must ammend out text file.

We must remove all instances of “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\”, we must make sure that our \ (slashes) are doubled so we replace \ with \\ on some editors you may need to replace \ with \\\\ because you need to escape it first, we must replace SOFTWARE with Software (not sure if we had to but for consistency sake I did). Now select all and copy it.

So now we edit system.reg, just scroll to the bottom and add our adobe.txt just by pasting it inside the file, don’t worry after wine run’s it’ll sort this file out.

Now all we got to do is run wine, from console type:

/usr/bin/wine /home/<USERNAME>/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Adobe/Photoshop\ 7.0/Photoshop.exe

We can create a shortcut for this but I’ll let you choose on how to do that, Hint: make sure it’s ran in Terminal mode.

That’s It.

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