From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

907 Repeating a face so it shares a common eye

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

907 Repeating a face so it shares a common eye

- Hey gang, this is Deke McClellan. Welcome to Deke's Techniques, the middle late July days. Today, we're inside Photoshop where we'll take a single face shot straight on, and we'll repeat it many times, as many times as you want, really, so that the model's left eye merges with her right over and over again. In all, we'll create a total of five interlocking faces or really one multi-faced mutant with five identical lips and noses, five indefinite, chins, and six, not entirely identical eyes, plus six mostly left eyebrows. Why, why do such a thing? Well, to quote the poet, there are quantities of human beings, but there are many more faces for each person has several. What Rilke failed to mention was that this is also a great example of free transform combined with layer masks along with a feature, a hidden feature that Photoshop calls create a duplicate while transforming again, or what I call mash your fist T. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here's the final version of the artwork, just so you have a chance to see it open inside Photoshop. We're going to be starting inside this portrait shot, which comes to us from the Dreamstime image library about which you can learn more and get some great deals at dreamstime.com/deke. All right, I'll get rid of that URL just by pressing the backspace key or the delete key on the Mac. And now I want to convert this flat background to an independent layer by double clicking on it. And I'll just go ahead and call this layer portrait let's say, and then I'll click, okay. Now in all, we're going to need five versions of this face. And so I'm going to jump another copy of it by pressing control alt J or command option J on the Mac, which forces the display of the new layer dialogue box. Oh, I can name this layer 270 PX for reasons that will become obvious in just a moment. And now I want to be able to see through this layer to the layer below, and so with my rectangular marquee tool selected up here at the top of the toolbox, I'll tap the five key to reduce the opacity here inside the layers panel to 50%. Right now we can't see any difference, and that's because a 50% image is sitting on top of 100% image, but we will see a difference as soon as we start moving this image by going up to the edit menu and choosing free transform or you can press control T here on a PC or command T on the Mac. And the reason we're using free transform is that I want to be able to move this image with numerical precision. And so notice if I go up here to the options bar and turn on this triangular Delta icon, then I'm going to see relative positions where the X and Y values are concerned. And now notice if I drag this guy over to the right, I'm going to see a location at which her left eye lines up with the right eye behind it, and that's going to happen and about 270 pixels incidentally. So I'll go ahead and change that X value accordingly. You want to make sure the Y value remains zero, at which point, just go ahead and press the enter key or the return key on the Mac a couple of times to accept that change. All right, now we can restore an opacity value of 100% just by tapping the zero key. And then I'm going to go over here to the layers panel, drop down to the bottom and click on this guy right here, add layer mask in order to add a blank layer mask, which appears here inside the layers panel. All right, now I'll go ahead and switch to the brush tool, which you can get by pressing the B key. And we're going to be wanting to paint portions of this layer away, meaning we want to paint with black. And so tap the D key to instate the default colors, which when working in a mask are white for the foreground color and black for the background, and then tap the X key in order to swap them so that we can paint with black. Now, right click inside the image window and I'll crank up the size value to, let's say 500 pixels. I also want a hardness value of 0% at which point I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac to accept that change. And then just so you can paint the smoothest brush strokes possible, go to the window menu and choose brush settings, or you have that keyboard shortcut of F5 if your function keys are handy and then take the spacing value down to 10%, and that'll give you a nice smooth brush stroke. All right, now I want to paint away portions of the left side of her face in order to reveal her duplicate in the background. And so I'm just going to just broadly paint in some stuff here, and then I'll alt click on this layer mask thumbnail here inside the layers panel or on the Mac, you would option click on it just so you can see your mask independently of the image. And now I'm going to back off a little bit, and I'm just going to paint in this white area over here on the left hand side of the image so I have complete coverage, and now I'll alt or option click on that layer mask thumbnail once again in order to bring back the composite image. But you want to make sure that your layer mask is still selected. After all, we're not done painting inside of it. All right, now we need to make some more fine tuned adjustments. So I'll reduce the size of my cursor by pressing the left bracket key, and then I'll tap the X key in order to swap the foreground and background colors. So I'll be painting with white. And then I'll go ahead and paint her chin back in. And by the way, whenever I'm painting with white I'm painting in the active layer. If I want to paint back the layer below, then I would tap the X key so then I'm painting with black and then I would brush like so. So you're going to have a little bit of chin overlap no matter what, but I'm going to tap the X key so I'm painting with white once again and click right there. All right, now I'm losing the eyebrow a little more than I'd like to, so I'm going to reduce the size of my cursor and paint that eyebrow back in like so, so that we have the full thing, and then I'll tap the X key. So I am now painting with black by the way, and I'll paint this region away and maybe not that much. So I'll tap the X key again and paint this detail back in, just so that we have something resembling a natural transition. Now, this area in the forehead's a little bit tough. I'll go ahead and click on it with white, by the way, but if I go too far, I end up bringing a lot of dark hair back in, so not going to do that. I'll just go ahead and undo that modification. And I think we can live with that kind of overlap going on. So I'll just go ahead and press control zero or command zero on a Mac in order to zoom out. Now how you work with the shoulders is up to you. Right now, the shoulders are kind of just merging in with each other, but I also liked the idea of having separate shoulders like so, so I'll just go ahead and paint in with white at this location right here. All right, now I just want to zoom in on the lips for a second and make sure that I'm not losing this lip over on the left hand side. So I'll reduce the size of my cursor once again, by pressing the left bracket key and I'll tap the X key so that I'm now painting with black and I'll click right about there. And that looks pretty darn good to me. Now you can bring in more details where the folds of that central eye are concerned, and then I'll tap the X key in order to switch back to white, and I'll paint this detail back in from the active layer. So ultimately how you go is entirely up to you. All right, now what we need to do is duplicate this effect over and over again. And so I'm going to switch back to the rectangular marquee tool just by tapping the M key, and then rather than going to the edit menu and choosing free transform or pressing control T or command T on the Mac, I'm go take advantage of a similar keyboard shortcut that allows me to duplicate this layer the same way I did last time, and that is to say, control shift alt T or command shift option T on the Mac. And what that does by virtue of the fact that you have the shift key down, it repeats the last transformation by virtue of the fact you have the alt or option key down, it creates a duplicate as well. Now, if you're seeing something you don't like at this point, like for example, I'm not really very happy with the way the transitions in the neck are looking, then just go ahead and undo that last transformation and press the B key to switch back to the brush tool. I think I do want to paint with white down here below the chin, but then I'll tap the X key to paint with black and go ahead and paint underneath the other chin as well. And I think I like that transition better. And just to test I'll once again, press mash your fist T, so control shift alt T here on a PC or command shift option T on the Mac. All right, now I'll press that keyboard shortcut two more times. So control shift alt T or command shift option T on the Mac so that we have a total of five faces. And because we have this link icon between the layer and the thumbnail here inside the layers panel, we're moving both of those elements at the same time. All right, now I want to take all these layers and more or less center them. And so notice that the top layer is currently active here inside the layers panel. What you want to do is shift click on the bottom most layer, the one called portrait, and that'll select that entire range of layers here inside the layers panel. At this point, we're seeing this little, no can do cursor and that's because I cannot paint in multiple layers at once. So I'll just tap the M key to switch back to my rectangular marquee. And then I will once again go to the edit menu and choose free transform. We're still seeing these relative X and Y values. You want to leave the Y value alone, but you want to set the X value to something resembling negative 270 because that's how far we moved the original head times two. So asterisk two. And that goes ahead and moves the layers 540 pixels to the left. Now that's a little too far in my opinion. So I went ahead and took this value up. So I'm just clicking inside the X value and I'm pressing shift up arrow in order to increase the value to negative 520, and then I'll tap the up arrow key one more time so that we have a value, which we'll show you here of negative 519 pixels. It's just what I came up with. And then I'll press the enter key or the return key on the Mac a couple of times to accept that change. All right, finally, I'm going to click on this top layer again in order to select it independently of the others and I'm going to shift click on the second to bottom one right there, and I'm going to take all of these duplicate layers and put them in a group by clicking on the fly out menu icon in the top right corner of the layers panel and choosing this command right here, new group from layers. And I'll just go ahead and call this group many faces, let's say, and then press the enter key or the return key on the Mac, and that just helps to tidy things up inside the layers panel. And that is how you duplicate a portrait shot many times over so that each pair of faces shares a common eye here inside Photoshop. Okay, one face interwoven five times. That's awesome, but wouldn't it be even awesomer if we were to color those faces with the rainbow? And were I to do so, I were to do so next week because let's face it, rainbows are colorful. Deke's Techniques each and every week. Keep watching.

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