GIMP

Dramatic intro done, let’s get all the prep work done:

1. Decide what you want to do. I want to make Lydia (Teen Wolf character) into a superhero. To do that I need to find a superhero to manip her face on. And I picked the episode of Charmed were the sisters are superheroes.

2. Get your caps, preferably HQ. Match the angles of the faces. So in the image where I’m gonna put a face on, the original face is turned a bit and looking to the left. So I tried to find something similar.Below you can see the pictures I chose, and what I mean by angle of the face. Also, similar (ish) lighting is good.

They’re facing the same way, and there’s similar coloring in terms of lighting. Here they also both have pale skin and red hair, but that is less important, especially the hair color.

Now for the actual editing!

1. Open up the picture the face is going on.

2. Open up the picture with the face and remove the unnecessary bits.

3. Make the two faces similar size, clicking on this tool in the tool window or shift+T.

Make sure that the chain is linked and re-size.

A tip is doing the resizing in increments (small steps) so that you don’t end up with a too small face.

4. When I’m fairly happy with the size, I duplicate the layer (ctrl+shit+d and there’s also an icon in the layer menu with two images on top of each other) and invisible the bottom one by clicking on the eye. This so that I have a back-up in case I mess up too much.

5. Delete everything you don’t need. This is mine.

And then I decided that her facial expression was uninteresting so I switched images.

To get this one to match I flipped it using below tool and also rotated it using below-below tool.

But otherwise I did the same thing.

6. Let’s get down to the actual matching part! Below will be a rundown of what I did to make my images match. You may not need to do all these steps, or you may need to do some other stuff. This is more of a general guide than a step-by-step tutorial.

IMPORTANT! The adjustments are made on duplicates of the below layer. This way I can easily undo my actions.

First I lighten up Lydia’s face. At the moment it’s too gray and dark. This is my curve:

Then I start with the hair. Looking at the image, I can see that I need to erase parts of it and I also want to make it more orangey, like the woman’s hair beneath. It would also fit more with the warmth of the background and the outfit.

I erase some hair, and the rest of her dress. The purple and grey parts you can see at the bottom of the hair is the dress.

Then I make a new layer, paint some orange over her hair and set it to soft light. I paint with a soft brush, like the default brush, and also apply some gaussian blur and lower the opacity to make it blend better. I merge the layer with orange on with the layer beneath. To do this right-click and then click merge with below layer (this may not be exactly what it says, as my GIMP is in swedish and I’m translating).

And now, even though the hair needs more work, I’m going to work on the neck, which is what was originally asked about. Here the skin is matched via curves, and they have very similar skintones anyway. If it’s not this easy to match, I’d suggest using the hue slider in the hue saturation tool (Colors>Hue Saturation). You can also use a color picker.

First I fix the necklace, using the color picker to pick the same pink as the rest of the necklace.

Then I use the copy tool to pick up skin, and paint over the hair.

It’s this symbol:

Pick a suitable spot, press ctrl and click. The spot that’s marked will now be your “paint”. The spot can’t be transparent, so create a new layer from visible. I also used the smudge tool to blend. It’s the hand with a finger sticking out.

I then zoom out and blend more with the same technique. I used a textured brush for this to make it look more natural, specifically an acrylic brush (I think that it looks more natural). And now I have this:

And now the hair. I use one of my duplicate layers (see the beginning of this step) to get some hair. I duplicate it and cut out pices of the hair and match it.

And this is what I got:

And with that I’m done with the photo manipulation. But after this I made more adjustments until I got the graphic I wanted. Those adjustments include sharpening, among others. So you’re not done after this.

1. Open all of the gifs up so that they are all ready. Open up the first frame as a picture, and the rest as layers.

2. Make the same adjustment to all the pictures at the same time. So, open them all up. Crop all the gifs (if you want to). Etc. 

3. Make a keyboard shortcut for resizing images. It is a lifesaver. Here are all the hotkeys. To change them, go to Edit>hotkeys/shortcuts (my GIMP is in swedish and I’m uncertain of the translation). Then, in the window that pops up, go to Image>Scale Image and activate it. Put whatever hotkey you want. It will be claimed by some other function, but a) you don’t need a hotkey for all the functions and b) some adjustments will be stuff you’ve never heard of. I put I (the letter). 

4. For applying the curve (or several curves) to all layers, copy the input, that is C:\\Users\*your username*\gimp-2.8\curves\ . I don’t put the name of my curve in the copied text because I might want to use different curves and then this method is easier. The text above is for Windows btw. 

5. Don’t apply the same curve to all the gifs if the frames come from different scenes. Check first that the curve fits. Use the curve tool, which will give you a preview. That said, I usually do apply my curve to everything even if the frames aren’t from the same scene. The worst that can happen is that I will have to undo. 

6. Make use of the ctrl+F function. It repeats the last action/adjustment. So when applying all the curves, ctrl+F. When sharpening, ctrl+F.