Photoshop: What If They Mated

For years Conan O'Brien has been doing a segment where he takes two stars, who may or may not be rumored to be dating, and melds their faces together to see what their children would look like. He is less than subtle about it and often exaggerates features and hairlines to shock the audience with a grotesque image that defies humanity. I love the idea but I wasn't about making something so grotesque. I thought it would be fun to combine friends who were not already melded together and see what we came up with. Imagine if this was available for use before dating someone! It might just be the most effective birth control available.

First and most important for making your work go smoothly and with the least amount of frustration is to have two pictures that are as perfectly matched in size and direction as possible. This mean two faces the same size facing the same direction. Part of the Conan grotesqueness is often due to the fact that the photos they are using are not matched.

I had the two pictures I liked but one needed to be enlarged. To do this I layered them one on top of the other. I turned down the opacity of the top layer so I could see the picture underneath and using the scale tool and pulled from the corners with the shift key held down to keep it proportional. Once the two faces were aligned I reset the opacity back to 100% and enlarged the canvas allowing both layers to be viewed side by side.

The next thing was to decide which face was going to be the background and which face was going to be the pieces. I decided the one with all the hair would be the background because I didn't want to move the hair strand by strand. (I would like to confess at this point that I did go back later and add in the ear taking the time to put the strands of hair flowing in front of it.) Now I needed to decide which features to move. Generally speaking some things are more recognizable than others. With this particular friend it's his nose and goatee that stand out the most.

Using the marquee tool I selected a large rectangle of the chin. I copied and pasted the selection onto it's own layer and positioned it to take the place of my own lower lip and chin. Removal of unnecessary parts (i.e. the upper lip and mustache) was done with the eraser tool. I started with a large round hard-edged brush then moved to a smaller soft-edged brush for getting up close. The point of using the smaller soft edged brush is not to have a parting line defining the point where the photos meet.

I used the same steps to move and meld the nose. The skin tone here was severely different which made the picture look slightly grotesque. Almost like a Michael Jackson paste on nose. I wasn't sure at first how to fix it. I didn't want to do anything too extreme because it was supposed to look morphed just not obscene. I opted to change the opacity on the eraser tool and use it to meld colors better without losing any of the depth and detail. I turned it down to 17% and still using the smaller soft-edged brush went over the edges to soften and blend them with the color from the lower level.

I still wasn't happy with the results from the eraser and to do anymore would be to obliterate the detail I was trying to save. Since the nose was on it's own layer I went into the variations palette and adjusted the color in the shadow and mid-tone ranges to bring it slightly closer.