meish dot org: life, unfolding

A friend shared a link to the Freaking News celebrity photoshop contest with me the other day, and in case you haven’t seen it, it’s worth a look. Basically, people have taken images of celebrities and then rotated their bodies while leaving their faces in place. It’s a little difficult to explain, but have a look at the examples in that link and you’ll get the idea.

Of course, everyone looks a bit weird, but the truly worrying thing is that some celebrities - Dennis Rodman, Elton John - actually look pretty good (or at least naturalish) with their faces on upside-down, if you can cast aside any lingering questions about what freakish accident might have caused them to end up thus afflicted.

So of course I had to have a go myself.

Aside from realising that it makes many of my male friends look like crazed Amish (above), or have heads that eerily work both ways up (below), I also discovered that even for a photoshop doofus like me, it only takes 5-10 minutes to do a passable version, and another 10 or so to polish it if you really must have it completely realistic (well, as realistic as a person with their face on upside-down can do, at least).

And here’s how you do it…

(instructions for Photoshop, though other graphics/photo editing tools that use layers can probably handle this in their own way, with slight variations in the tools)

1. Find a picture of your subject. Full-face on is easiest to handle.
2. I realised that black and white images were slightly easier to manage, because you don’t have to content with skin tones as well as shadows. For this reason, you might want to desaturate or convert your image to B&W.
3. Using the freehand lasso tool with a 1px feathered edge, draw a rough shape around your subject’s facial features, including a little above the eyebrows, around the cheeks, down across the middle of their chin. Basically, you want their features and some extra.
4. Copy and paste this selection into a new layer.
5. Hide the new (face) layer for the moment.
6. On the original layer, use the clone stamp tool with a relatively small brush setting to clone a “blank” bit of your subject’s face (e.g cheek or forehead) and paint the cloned sample carefully over their eyes, nose, mouth and eyebrows. You might need to sample different areas to avoid pattern build-up and to mimic natural shadows/lighting.
7. Using the smudge and blur tools, polish the now-blank face area to get rid of any weird hard edges or obviously-cloned bits.
8. You will now be presented with the blanked-out face of your subject, perfectly smooth as if the skin just grew over their features over time. I accept no responsibility for any nightmares this may cause.
9. Reveal the top (features) layer again.
10. Hey presto! Your subject’s face is back!
11. Using the Free Transform tool, grab a corner of your subject’s face and spin it round so it’s upside down. Don’t worry too much about placement at this stage.
12. Rotate the entire canvas (both layers) 180°. Your subject’s body and head should now be upside-down and their face the right way up.
13. I have found that in order to preserve light & shade, it can sometimes help to flip the background (body/blankface) layer Left-Right, so that the light source for the (upside-down) background is on the same side as the (right-way-up) features. If you need to do this, select that layer and then use the Transform > Flip horizontal command.
14. Now for the tidying up. Select the features level, and position it on the blank upside-down face so that the eyes are roughly on a level with the ears.
15. You might need to free transform the features layer to rotate it a few degrees one way or the other to get it to look ok.
16. Once it’s in the right position, use the Blur tool to create a successful 90s indie band and then give it all up to live in the countryside and make cheese before getting back together to play the festival circuit ten years later when the tax bill arrives.
17. Not really. Use the Blur tool with a 95% strength setting to soften the edges of the features chunk.
18. You should see the features settle into the setting of the blank face as you go around the edges.
19. If any more polishing is required, you can use the Eraser tool (Stippled brush / opacity 60% / flow 80% ish) to nudge around the edges of the features layer, which will help to blend it in with the background.
20. That should be it! Save it as a jpg, upload it somewhere and share a link to it in the comments below.

You might also need to do something to even out texture across the face, because all that blurring will mean that areas of the photo that were in sharp focus and haven’t been blurred will look a bit weird next to the other bits. To solve this, you could always start out with a slightly fuzzy image, or apply an unsharp mask to the feature layer. Or do something clever with stippling which takes longer than 10 minutes.

YM-as ever-MV.