Tenacious Creations

 All right in today’s’ tutorial I am going to walk you through turning a photo of a woman, into a photo of a cat woman. So first we have to start off with our images. Now in some e-mails that I have received people have asked me where they can get royalty free stock photos. Well for this tutorial I went to http://www.sxc.hu/. Membership is free and there are a lot of good source images there.

 You’ll need a photo of a cat, and one of a woman unless you are using your own. Or you can click on the thumbnails below and use the same images I did.

 In order to do this successfully you must keep the distinguishing features or both the woman and the cat. Otherwise all you would be doing is pasting a cats head on a woman’s body and that is really not very impressive. So lets begin…

• Open both images you’ll be using and display them side by side. This way we can decide which features we want to retain from each image. I want to keep the woman’s hair, eye shape, and mouth. From the cat I want to use the pupils, whiskers, ears and nose. With any luck when I combine these together I should get a pretty convincing cat woman.

• Select the cat image to begin with. Use the elliptical marque tool by holding down the SHIFT key and pressing M. Click and drag it around the cats left eye, you don’t have to be too precise as we will fix up the edges later. Now select the MOVE tool. and drag your selection onto the picture of the woman.

 


 
• When you drag this selection onto the woman it will create a new layer. Double click on the layer name and rename it left pupil. Now select Edit > Free Transform . Holding down the shift(this constrains the proportions) key drag the bottom right corner to resize the cat eye to the size of the pupil of the woman. I like to reduce the opacity of this layer to about 60% while I do this so I can see the woman’s pupil beneath as I resize. You may have to occasionally move the pupil of the cat eye to the center of the woman’s pupil as you resize.

• Once you have the cats pupil to the right size now select the ERASER . Make sure your brush hardness is low, or even zero. Using a large brush gently erase around the edges to blend the cat pupil to the woman’s eye. Below is what my brush was set to.
  
• Now choose hard light from the drop down blending modes menu on your layers palette. Now repeat the selection, transform and blending process for the right eye.

 
 

 
 
• Go back to the image of the cat and hit the L key for the freehand lasso tool. Draw a rough selection around the cats face, and drag your selection onto the face of the woman. Rename the new layer face and set the opacity to around 50%. Press Ctrl/(Apple Key) +T to apply the free transform box. Now reposition and resize the cats face to correspond to that of thew woman’s. I like to try and line up the noses and go from there.

 



 
 
• Now to blend the woman’s and cats face we are going to use a layer mask. While have the face layer selected click on the Create New Layer Mask Icon . Press the D key to ensure you have a white foreground and a black background. Select Black as your foreground color by click this icon . Select a soft brush and pint black over the areas of the cats face you wish to remove. Once you have removed most of the areas you want to remove set your opacity back to 100% and fine the mask. Do this by switch between painting with black to remove the area and white to return it. Don’t worry if the cats fur does not cover all of here face, we will fix that in the next step. Once your are happy with your layer mask right click on the layer mask icon and select Apply Layer mask

 
 



 
 
• Now with my images here I have to patch her forehead with fur. So in order to do this I used the freehand lasso tool to select an area of fur. Then right click over your selection and select Layer Via Copy, then using the Move tool and Free Transform I make this selection fit over her fore head. Notice I over lap the previous fur section. Then just as in the previous step I use a Layer Mask and a soft brush to blend the two together. Make sure you blend where the two fur sections meet or you’ll see a distinct line between the two.

 
 



 
 


 
 
• Now we have to cover the rest of her skin with cat fur. To do this go back to the picture of the Cat. Make sure you last selection is turned off by going Select > Deselect. Just as before using the Move tool drag this selection over to the picture of the woman. Reduce the opacity of this layer to around 50%. Using the Free Transform tool make this cover most of her exposed skin.

 
 




 
 
• Here again we use a layer mask to reveal the parts of the woman we want to keep. Now because she has a fair bit of loose hair strands we have to really vary the size or our brush while making our mask. The [ makes your brush larger while the ] makes your brush smaller. Hitting the X key will switch your foreground and background colors allowing you to change from adding the mask and removing the mask. The more time you spend on this part masking the better the final image. Attention to detail will definitely pay off here. When you are happy with your mask once again apply it. After doing a relatively quick masking job and changing the opacity to 100% this is my result.

 
 





 
 

• Now go back the background layer. Using the Lasso Tool select a section of hair beneath her right ear. Right click and select Layer Via Copy, using the Move tool and Free Transform I made this selection cover her right ear. Again using a layer mask try and blend this section of hair with the rest. Doing a quick job like I did here really shows.

 
 





• Now using the methods we used previously. Go back to the picture of the cat and using the lasso tool select a rough selection around the cats left ear. Using the Move tool drag the ear onto the picture of the woman. Once again use a mask and blend this in. Do the same for the cats right ear. Again the more time you spend on attention to detail the better the image will look. I was running short of time here and had to do a quick job. (I’ll come back later and fix this up)

 
 

 Now if you were not like me and took your time you should have a resonabley good looking cat woman. I hope you enjoyed this tuturial. For others click here.

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