creating a picture

Thought I'd share a new skill with you that I just picked up and has already come in handy. "Head swapping." I learned it HERE, but I thought I would share with you my own example. We've all had a time when we take a group picture, and everyone looks wonderful... save one person who's making a face or looking away or blinking. Well, lets fix that.

I shared this picture recently:

Love it!

The original...

not quite so great. (Hello baby who did NOT want to pose for a picture. Hello huge glare on mama's glasses.)

So we open the original in your photo editing software. I'm cheap, so I use the free (but completely awesome) paint.net (that's the name of the program, its not an online editor) to edit mine. And find another picture from the same trip, with a better face:

You carefully select just the face from the other picture (hence why the original paint won't work) and copy it. In the original picture, create a new layer and paste in the head.

Move the new head over the old one and resize (hold down the shift key while using your mouse on the corner dot of the new head to keep your dimensions the same while resizing). Once your head is the proper size for the body its time to clean it up a bit.

Select the eraser function and erase any bits from the new head that don't need to be there... a stray bit of neck, etc. I also used the lasso select tool to select bits where the old coloring and the new coloring were off enough to create a line between them... I then used the blur tool to blend them together.

Wah-la! Happy family photo!