Tenacious Creations

 With this PhotoShop tutorial I hope to equip you with the necessary tools to create your own hybrid morphed animals. This can be a lot of fun and you can create some really unique looking creatures. As with anything in photoshop the more time you spend on the details the better your end result.

 Now I bet you were thinking we were going to combine an elephant with a camel. Well you would be wrong. Instead we are going to make an Eleguanna. That is an elephant combined with an Iguana. Why? Well I just like combining large mammals with lizards. Besides this gives me the opportunity to share a few more neat tricks. The hardest part of this tutorial is find the pictures you are going to use. I scoured over www.sxu.hu to find these two images. You want to make sure that the parts you are going to attempt to morph are following roughly the same angles. If you click on the thumbnails below you with get the two original images I started with.

1. Once you have these two images opened in Photoshop it is time to crop out the elephants head. Now you’ll notice the elephant is facing the wrong way in relation to our iguana. No worries, just go to Image > Rotate Canvas > Flip Horizontal. Now use what ever tool you are comfortable with to crop out the elephants head. I used the pen tool and then made it into a selection.
2. Once you have the elephants head selected, go to Edit > Copy. Then go to the image of the iguana and go Edit > Paste.

 

 

3. Now we have to position the elephants head over that of the iguanas. To make this easier reduce the opacity of the elephant head layer. Now you may have to rotate it a bit and resize as you go. If you are resizing make sure you hold down the shift key. This will keep the proportions relative. With PhotoShop CS 3 as soon as you paste the elephant head it goes to Free Transform mode. By moving the handles on the box around the elephants head you are able to resize and rotate.


 
 

 
 

4. Make sure you have the elephant head layer selected and click on the mask icon in the layer palette. Then make sure you foreground color is black, and choose a good sized soft brush. With this mask out all areas of the elephant head that you do not want visible. make sure to go along the edges where the elephants skin meets the iguanas. This will help blend it together.

     




5. Now you will notice there is still some of the iguanas head peeking through from behind. To remove this we are going to use the Clone Stamp Tool . First make sure you select the iguana layer. Then holding down the Alt Key select an area above the part you want to clone out. Then click over the areas you want to clone out. Do not worry about cloning out the elephant head as the clone tool will only clone the layer you have selected.

 

 
 

6. Looking pretty good so far. But now we want to match the color. First make sure your elephant head layer is selected. This part takes some time and experimentation. Holding down the Alt Key click on this icon . Then select Color Balance, when the dialog appears make sure you have a check mark to use the previous layer as a clipping mask. You’ll have to adjust the shadows, highlights, and mid tones. Try and get it as close as possible.

 

 

 
 

 
 

 
 

7. You see that some areas have the color changed and we don’t really want them to be green. Places like the eye, and the straw in the truck. To fix this select your color balance layer and then click the mask button on the bottom of the layers palette. With black selected as your foreground color, just paint the areas you want the original color back.

 

 
 

8. Now click on your top most layer, then add a new layer. Double click on your foreground color to bring up your color picker tool. Select a nice soft blue color. I find blue tends to bring out details. In the picture below I have my color picker set to Web Safe colors but you don’t have to.

 

 
 

9. Using the Paint Bucket tool fill this layer with the soft blue. Then change the Layer Mode to Overlay . Now adjust the Opacity till you the details pop and the layers blend nicely.

 

 

 
 

10. Now click on your top most layer, then add a new layer. Double click on your foreground color to bring up your color picker tool. Select a dark pale yellow color.
11. Using the Paint Bucket tool fill this layer with the soft blue. Then change the Layer Mode to Overlay . Now adjust the Opacity till the layers blend a bit more.

 Viola, you should have an image looking like mine or even better. Now there are several different ways to do the same thing in PhotoShop, so if your methods differed a bit don’t worry.

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