Skin and shadow tone

[Bloodbro]

I'm trying to merge a new face to a new pic but these 2 images are having different skin and shadow tone..anyone could advise as how should I go about doing it so that it looks realistic?? Thanks a million

[Flora]

Hi Bloodbro,

Welcome to RP!

What I usually do in similar cases is:

Use Curves/Levels to blend tone and contrast.
Use Selective Color/Hue&Saturation to blend colours.

You should also make sure that the light source is correct and try to match the grain/smoothness of the different pictures.

Finally you should also be very careful with blending the edges of the 'pasted' parts .... they can be a dead giveaway ....

If you could post the pictures or part of them, you'll get more specific help!

If you need help with attaching pictures to your threads or with their size and resolution, just follow the links under my 'signature'

[Bloodbro]

Originally Posted by Flora

Hi Bloodbro,

Welcome to RP!

What I usually do in similar cases is:

Use Curves/Levels to blend tone and contrast.
Use Selective Color/Hue&Saturation to blend colours.

You should also make sure that the light source is correct and try to match the grain/smoothness of the different pictures.

Finally you should also be very careful with blending the edges of the 'pasted' parts .... they can be a dead giveaway ....

If you could post the pictures or part of them, you'll get more specific help!

If you need help with attaching pictures to your threads or with their size and resolution, just follow the links under my 'signature'

Thanks for welcoming me to this big family of RP

Will try to post a pic when I get home, currently using a public PC..hee

Have looked through almost all of the tutorial and read all the threads..I found it very informative and amazed by the works of other members..hopefully I'll be as good as them one day.

Normally for this kind of work the steps i do is:
1) Cloned the new face to a new layer of the image I wanted to manipulate
2) Adjusting the size of the new face to the image's face
3) Then I adjust the transparency level of the new face layer (85-90%)
4) After that I used the eraser to erase the edges and other area (at 50% opacity)
5) Finally I adjust the color.

The problem is I can't figured out as in how to go about creating a similar shadow in the old image to the new face.

[Bloodbro]

Just for information, I am using Photoshop 6.0

[Flora]

Hi again,

you are surely on the right track!!!!

Instead of cloning, I usually go for the loosely select, feather, copy and paste ... but that's only the way I feel most comfortable with ....

Different lights and shadows are the biggest problems in this procedure ... and it's very difficult to give specific advice without having worked on the picture .... What I suggested in my previous post are 'general' guidelines ....

If you can post the pictures, could I ask you to post both originals and your correction so far? (you can attach up to 5 pictures to the same post as long as they don't exceed the 100KB each ....)

Glad you specified your PS version .... anybody helping will know which tools they can use and which not!!!

[Bloodbro]

May I know is it better to adjust the color in CMYK mode or RGB mode??? Could someone tell me how to go about using selective color?? So that the new face skin tone will be matching to the original image??

[Flora]

When necessary, I change to CMYK but I usually do all my restoration in RGB as the only mode where all filters and plug-ins are available ....

As for Selective Colors, (Relative Box checked ... you could try Absolute but, sometimes, the result are too drastic for my taste....) it's a matter of trial and error .... usually, for skin corrections, Reds, Yellows, Neutrals and Blacks are the colours to be tweaked .....