Head Swaps!

As much as I’d love to take the perfect portrait every time, when I’m photographing large groups or young siblings, it’s not always feasible to get everyone looking at the camera at the same time.  This is when a head swap is sometimes needed! Check out this tutorial to learn how to do it well -

Here are the 2 pictures I found that I wanted to combine. I liked how mommy and big sister looked in the picture on the right, and how the baby looked in the picture on the left.  My game plan is to swap the baby’s head in the picture on the right, with the one on the left.

Here are the steps I recommend for a head swap -

1. Pick 2 pictures you want to swap. Make sure these 2 pictures will work together (not all will!).

2. Open the 2 pictures in Photoshop. Since part of my workflow involves doing some edits in Adobe Camera Raw, I make the edits there, then synchronize the edits so that both pictures are as similar as possible.

3. Once both pictures are opened in Photoshop, I take the head I want to copy, select the lasso tool, and make a very loose circle around the head. I am careful not to select too much of other people, but to select plenty of the background (like the bricks).

4. Once my selection is made, I right click and choose, “Layer via Copy”

5. I then click on the new layer in the layers palate, and choose “Duplicate Layer”. When the dialog box appears, I select the other picture (what will be my “final” picture) in the drop down box as my “destination”.

6. I then choose “Window” -> select my “final” picture to view. I notice that the layer (head of the baby) that I copied into the file is now there.

7. Here is where the fun begins. I now line the baby’s head and part of her body up with the picture that is underneath this new layer. I move it around, sometimes I have to tilt it (ctrl+T, move the corner arrows) if I happened to have tilted my camera in between taking the 2 shots, and I line it up as perfectly as I can get it. If it won’t line up perfectly, you may have to make your selection again and leave out areas that are hard to line up.

8. Once I’ve lined up the layer as well as I can, I then make a “layer mask”  by clicking the “add layer mask” button on the layers palate. I then select a small soft-edge brush tool, making sure that black is my foreground color, and paint the edges of the copied layer. All the sudden, the image begins to look seamless. If I over-paint a part, I can change my brush color back to white (just hit the “x” key), and paint back over the parts I didn’t mean to erase.

I then end up with a perfect head-swap! From there, I flatten the layers and can now finish my post-processing workflow!

BEFORE (SOOC – “straight out of the camera):

AFTER (headswap, then the rest of my edits):