It’s time for the next entry into the Photoshop Phun folder. I originally planned on demonstrating how to take a blurry image and sharpen it up in a better way than the standard “Sharpen” tool or command. I received a few emails requesting something else, along with a blog comment asking for the same. So, today I’m going to show you how I turned Tyler into a vampire. Don’t worry though, we’ll work on blurry photos next week.

I don’t usually save the files I create when I do some of this stuff. Sadly, that was the case with the vampire picture. I have a copy of the final result, but not the steps I took to get there. So, I had to start from scratch to walk through this tutorial. In the end, I guess it worked out, because it afforded me the opportunity to make a video of the process. If you’ve got 10 minutes to kill, check it out below, or over on YouTube for the high quality version.

The picture above is the picture we’re going to create. The picture below is the original vampire picture that I posted a month ago. I’m much happier with the new version, specifically the eyes.

And just for the sake of reference. The following picture is the source image. I’ll leave it up to you to decide if Tyler is really a vampire and I just photoshopped him to look human, or if he’s actually among the living and I fabricated the vampire image.

This project is much more involved than the one I posted last week, where I simply copied Tyler’s eyes from one picture to another. As such, it would be very difficult for me to detail every step of the process in writing. This is why I’ve made a video. Still, here are the basic steps of the project:

1. After the image is loaded. Create a new layer that is a copy of the image (just in case you severely screw up and need to start over with the original image).
2. Using the magic wand (or other lasso tool of your choice), create a selection of Tyler’s left eye.
3. Refine the edge (reference the video for details) so that all of the colored part of the eye is captured.
4. Copy the selection to a new layer.
5. Do the same for the other eye.
6. Select the “Smudge” tool and create some pointed teeth by tapering the brush size, large to small.
7. Select the “Dodge” tool to lighten the skin tones of Tyler’s face (I incorrectly say in the video that it removes the color to white, where it actually selectively lightens an image).
8. Using the Dodge tool, paint over all the skinned areas of Tyler’s face (leave the lips, tongue, and eyes alone). The more you “paint” the lighter/whiter these areas become, so don’t go too crazy at first. You can always reapply the brush to areas that need more attention.
9. The eyes. Go into the “Enhance > Adjust Color > Color Variations” menu.
10. You gotta play with this screen. Here’s exactly how I got the end result:
    1. Click “Highlights” > Click “Increase Red” one time
    2. Click “Shadows” > Click “Increase Red” two times
    3. Click “Midtones” > Click “Increase Red” four times
       In the video, I mis-spoke about how many clicks I used.
    4. Click OK
11. Now we need to blend the eyes into the image. Select the left eye, and change the blending mode to “Hard Light”.
12. Do the same for the right eye.
13. Don’t tell anyone, they’ll really, truly think your child is one of the forbidden Immortal Children.

As a note: You’ll notice there’s a skin tone difference from the top vampire image and the one under it. In the one on the bottom, I used the “Dodge” tool much more, then set the blending mode to “Soft Light”. I like the new version better, but if you wanted to recreate the older one, that’d be the extra step you’d need to take.

Now for the video!!! Click this link to go right to YouTube. There you can click on “HQ” on the player to view a better quality version of the video. Otherwise, just watch below:

Note: I don’t have a computer microphone, so I grabbed the headset from my Xbox360 and re-wired it to work in the computer. Problem is, I could only get the right channel to work, so when you watch the video, sound only comes out of the right speaker. Either that, or I hate my voice so much that I made it so you only had to listen to it with one ear.

I’m a big fan of organization when it comes to my music collection, videos, and photos. I use a very structured folder hierarchy and tagging process so that I have little difficulty in finding just about anything. I became a huge fan of using a program called Photoshop Elements (actually, I began with a program called Photoshop Album, which is now bundled with Elements) for my photo collection. It only made sense to me to move on from my previous photo editing program (one that had been outdated and discontinued for a few years – clicky), to the program that marries nicely with what I was already using. I don’t use the full Photoshop program, because of its obscene price tag. Instead, I use the watered-down, novice-friendly Photoshop Elements. Lately, I have made a concerted effort to learn to use the graphic EDITING features of the program, so that I can make good photos into better photos.

Some of my editing projects are done for fun (like this, this, and this). Others are done because I have an ALMOST great picture, and I really don’t want to delete it just because Tyler was in mid-blink when the shutter snapped on the camera. The purpose of what I hope to be a semi-regular series of posts titled Photoshop Phun is to showcase some of the things that a novice (yes, I am a complete novice where it relates to Photoshop, but I’m learning) can do with your almost-perfect pictures. Don’t worry, most, if not all, of the pictures will have Tyler in them, so it still fits with my daddy-blog focus, right? RIGHT?!

Here, we have a picture of Tyler with his Aunt Ace.

The picture looks great, right? Well, that’s because you’re looking at the after picture. If I showed you the before picture first, you’d inevitably say that you can easily see the difference and the manipulation was the work of a novice (which as I’ve said, it is). Here is the before picture:

The only difference is the spot of marinara sauce on Tyler’s nose that needed to be removed. Oh, and the fact that he couldn’t keep his eyes opened for the 1/200 second shutter speed.

So, how does one salvage a picture like this? His Aunt Ace looks beautiful, and I frankly don’t have a lot of pictures of the two of them together. Finding a way to keep this picture is crucial. In a nutshell, here are the bullet points in making this picture work:

1. Find another picture with the features you need. Here, I need a picture of Tyler with his eyes open. He needs to be in the same perspective as well (it’s not critical, but it definitely helps). What I mean is, he can’t have his head turned too far, since he’s looking straight on in the photo I’m trying to fix. I picked this picture, because it was taken just minutes later, so the lighting was identical.
2. Cut the eyes out of the picture from step one and paste them into the photo you’re fixing.
3. Make the cut out eyes layer 50% transparent.
4. Position the eyes directly over the half closed eyes and resize them to match.
5. Knock the opacity back up to 100% (not transparent).
6. Use the feathered-edge eraser to erase the hard lines around the cut out eyes
7. Adjust lighting, hue and saturation to match.
8. Don’t tell anyone, they’ll never notice unless you draw their attention to it.