Lightening fast manipping tutorial

[zoetrope]

Not many people in fandom who *want* to manip need lessons in *how*. This tutorial really works as a tips guide as to how to achieve the best blend possible. I don't claim to be any kind of manipping guru, but maybe in this tut I'll show you something that I've learned that you didn't already know about.

It is almost impossible to get a perfect manip. The odds of finding a source picture that has your guy at the exact colour, angle and expression you need are not in your favour. So really, the key to a good manip is making it as natural *as possible*. The main thing I note when manips really jump out as not working is head size and angle. This is really difficult to achieve, and in the manip I use here I don't think it quite works... but again, we're working with what we've got here, which is the best match possible.

However, the second thing is colour. So many times I've seen manips where the colour and lighting don't match. So that's what this tut is going to focus on.

I'm going to concentrate on John.

I looked for a picture of him sleeping. There isn't one that would work. So then I had to improvise, and scoured the footage, eventually finding one that would work, in which he is blinking:



I began by cutting out his head. I do this by first adjusting the levels (ctrl+l), making the contrast greater so that I can see clearly where the edges are. I use a small but soft brush, trace around his head - don't try and be too accurate with his hair, you'll be there hours and odds on end up with something unusable! I use a large soft brush around the base of his neck, because on the picture that's usually where you need to achieve a blend effect.



After I've cut him out, I use the smear tool on a small brush - 3px set to about 60% strength. I then brush his hair! I smear out the strands of hair directionally, achieving his natural messy look and avoiding a cardboard cutout effect. This looks so much more natural than if you try and cut his hair out strand by strand.

As you can see on the above picture, a small thing I do is to create a brightly coloured background layer, so that the contrast is marked. It's so much easier to see.

Once I've done that, I prepare my source image.



As you can see, I've already placed Rodney's head and blended his colours. I'll show you how to do this with John in a moment. You'll also see that I've covered the original actor's hand. I'll talk this through in a moment too. For now, let's concentrate on where we're going to put John's head.

I use the smear tool a lot when manipping, mainly because it's better to work with the material you've got than to impose upon it. So here I've used a small-medium sized brush to smear the shadow across his face.
John's head is at a different angle, so we won't be able to just cover up the guy underneath, we'll need to delete him.
I've also smeared the pillow across a little.

Drag and drop the head onto the canvas, and position him as naturally as possible.



Next I blend his colours. As you can see, his face is much brighter than the muter original source image. I use the burn tool to get rid of the inappropriate highlights on his face. I set it to quite a large soft brush and the burn mode to highlights, the exposure to no more than 50%. I sweep it across his face until it looks about right. Don't forget the highlights in his hair as well!



I also have desaturated his face a little bit using the hue/saturation tool (ctrl+u).

I think his face is still slightly the wrong colour. To change this I play with the curves (ctrl+m).



Make sure you click the drop-down menu at the top of the curves window, and change it from RGB to one of the other colours. I tend to play and see what looks most realistic. You can always undo it and try again if you don't like the outcome.

Next I do his hand on Rodney's face.

I copy and paste the original hand from the source layer and carefully cut it out and overlap it onto Rodney's face. 



Then, to get rid of the inappropriate bracelet, and to give it a bit of a "John" feel, I just painted a wrist cuff on using a black brush.

I recreated the original black border using a square tool, and dropped a little shadow onto a new layer under the hand, using a soft black brush, to give it realism. I did the same under both their heads, following the curve of their heads with a soft black brush, and then using the smear tool to follow the folds of the pillow.

If you're doing an image with blacks that aren't as pronounced, I would advise using a medium-dark grey instead of black, and setting the layer to multiply. This will give it that opaque shadow look and seem more natural.



Once I'm happy with the image, I then play with effects on top of it. It's really a personal choice, but I tend to find that with most manips, the edges are still too easy to make out unless you use what I call a "unifying" effect.

To do this, I select the whole image (ctrl+a) and then copy all visible layers (ctrl+shift+c). This will paste the flattened image onto the top layer:



I then duplicate that layer, and set the style to soft light:





This usually helps to really unify the image, and also highlights any areas that may be too saturated or wrong in some other way. Quite often after doing this, I'll delete the new layers and go back to alter the original image, changing the angle of the head or something, and then recopy and paste to try another unifying effect.


To this image, I then added some flat colour layers, a light grey-blue set to colour burn, a skin-tone set to overlay and the same colour set to multiply. This plays with the colours and shadows a bit, and gives a blanket effect to the image that unifies it (hence the name!). Of course, the more you do this, the more stylized the image looks, so that's where you make your choice. I play with the opacity of the layers, and also added a bit of texture using brushes from misprinted type - a site I couldn't live without!

After doing all this, I thought John's face looked a little too saturated, so I used the sponge tool on a large soft brush set to desaturate 50%, and swept it over him a little.





The last thing I did was, thinking the image too dark, I chose the bottom layer and lightened the whole thing using levels (ctrl+l)



And there you have it! Not perfect, but hopefully you'll have picked *something* up from some of the techniques I use!

Feel free to ask questions - I'm sure I've probably left stuff out!

Comments

[sandrainthesun.livejournal.com]

Great tutorial. It's always interesting to see how other people do things.

My question: What is the source image. Is that a screencap from a movie or a show?

Anyway, sleeping Sheppard while Summner is around = *g*

[j-s-cavalcante.livejournal.com]

Fabulous tutorial. Thank you for posting it! *bookmarks*

[revbiscuit.livejournal.com]

This is really interesting, thank you. I've never dabbed in manips, but I've always been curious about the various techniques people use. This tutorial is a real eye opener, great stuff.

[xenachan.livejournal.com]

Great tuto !! ^^
Definitely use it in future, thanks a lot 8)

[nos4a2no9.livejournal.com]

Great tutorial. I haven't attempted maniping or anything with digital images since I got my Mac and surrendered my copy of Adobe, but this makes me want to give maniping a try. Thanks for all the info and coaching on technique!

[originalkitsune.livejournal.com]

Sweet tutorial! Nice tips too. :D

I personally like the clone tool for copying parts of skin. Between that and combining smear and airbrush, you can get a pretty realistic effect.

That and if all colour manipulation fails, you can also go "vintage" with black and white or a sepia look! LOL!