the Head and other Body Parts
page 1
New work image.
New work image.
Ideally, when you are working from an image of a family member, the face layer and work image layers would appear as the image below. and you would hide the face layer and make the workImage layer. Now, I've already written the LayerLift Tutorial (a long time ago) I'm using in this part of the work It will explain the technique I rely on for the sectioning off of the image parts.
Set the freehand selection tool options like this for the body parts layers to keep smooth edges - **this will cause a problem which you have to overcome later by other means.
I started with the full image at full size image with the background already cleaned off.
Select the area of the head. Stay precisely on the contour lines (as learned in the Cleaning tutorial) where the image meets another portion of the image (this is why I usually clean away the background first according to the Cleaning Tutorial as it speeds up the selections.
Next, I click in the center of the selection to set the selection to the edges in the open area.
I saved the selection to Alpha channel as head so I can use the selection to remove the overflow on the face layer caused by the blurring of cheeks and debit.
then I promote the selection to it's own layer which causes the head to be removed from the rest of the body and be moved to it's own layer which I rename 'workImage-head'. I name each section of the body layers as 'workImage-?' because these layers will be deleted as each section is completed and I don't want to risk deleting the wrong layer by accident.
hide the workImage layer and activate the face layer.
Load head selection from alpha channel, invert selection and delete the selection to get rid of cheek blur - you may not see the blur extending past the face area since it's so light - but trust me - it's there! Then activate the 'workImage-head' layer and hide the face layer. **I won't hide the face layer since I want to protect my little model.
If you haven't made a colorSwatch image to this point, made one now - it's invaluable to each graphic you create.
you should already have your light skin color, dark skin color and cheeks color from doing the face - I won't repeat this instruction further. Save it as 'colorSwatch' and you can use your color dropper to pick up the colors as you need them. DO NOT attempt to use this one as it has been compressed for the sake of image load time and colors are not correct.
With 'workImage-head' activated, add new layer named 'Head' and load the light skin color to color the selection. I use the paintbrush for this to take care of the antialias problem in the selection. Size=150, opacity=100, hardness=100.
and this is what I get!
Expand the selection by 1; find a medium skin shade and add it to your swatch; apply the cutout filter using the settings below and setting the shadow color to the medium skin shade.
Add noise using the settings below
Select paintbrush and set as below
Add a new layer and hide the head layer - take a good look at your photo coloring and brush the dark skin color to everywhere the skin looks darker - you may have to adjust the size of the brush to keep from overdoing it.
Unhide the head layer and continue to brush the areas until the shading looks right to you.
While the head is still selected, apply the gaussian blur with setting somewhere between 4 & 8.
Don't worry too much about the upper head as the hair will cover that; concentrate on the head around the facial area.
You need to do the ear markings the same as you did the eyes/eyebrows. I use a 1 pixel brush, loaded the working face image and picked up the color from the inner ear marks, added a new layer named ears and traced the ear markings then used the regular 'blur' 3 times to get this
This is the image with work layer visible
Below is the artwork thus far, without the work image showing.
Next, we will tackle the hair . . .
Tutorial by CSGreen
01-03-2002
