...Star Trek: The Next Generation...
...House...
...and 24...
...as well as popular movies like Harry Potter and the Something or Other...
...Ocean's 13...
...and even The Simpsons Movie.
Most recently, I appeared in the hit NBC show Heroes:
You are probably asking yourself, "How does Diesel do it? What's his secret?"
Well, this may surprise you, but those pictures were actually digitally altered. I was never really in any of those shows. And now, with my new 10 step program, you too can appear to have been in your favorite TV shows and movies without the hassle of traveling to exotic locations or meeting gorgeous movie stars.
Step 1: Google Image Search is your friend.
It took me a while, but eventually I found a pretty good scene from Heroes. The higher the resolution, the better. This one was 771x671, which is pretty good. I shrank it to 500x435 so it would fit here. By the way, I use Paint Shop Pro, but any full featured image manipulation app (like Photoshop) will work. MS Paint isn't going to cut it though.
Step 2: Find a picture of yourself. I usually just use one from my vast library of self-portraits, but sometimes I get ambitious and take a picture especially to fit into a particular scene. In the pics above, only the House and 24 images were specifically taken for this purpose. The most important things to look at are (1) orientation of the head, and (2) lighting. The human eye is very perceptive, and it can tell when the lighting isn't exactly right. The Heroes pic isn't my best work, because the lighting was off, and it shows.
You'll notice that I've used this pic of myself several times, including the Lost pic, where I used my entire upper torso. It's a good angle for me, because you can't tell that I have a weak chin.
Step 3: Make a copy of the original pic. This will be helpful for blending later on.
Step 4: Cut off your head. I use the "Smart Edge" selection tool in PSP. Then I paste my head as a new image.
Step 5: Resize your head and paste it into the photo. There is some trial-and-error here. I think I tried resizing it to 60%, but then my head looked too small so I tried 70%. That was too big, so I tried 65%. I think I ended up at 62%.
Step 6: Adjust the color. You'll notice that my head looks a lot more bluish and washed out than Claire's. That's because the lighting is so different. There's a limit to how much we can fix, but let's see what we can do about that. First we adjust the color (Colors/Adjust/Color Balance). Basically I took out a lot of blue and added yellow. Then I increased the contrast by 10% (Colors/Adjust/Brightness-Contrast) and decreased the brightness by 10%. (Note that at this point my head is still selected, so these color changes only affect my head, not the whole image.)
Step 7: Sharpen it up. Because the light on my face is softer than on Claire's, my face seems slightly flat and fuzzy in comparison. I simply go to Effects/Sharpen/Sharpen to sharpen my face up a bit. (I think I also decreased the color saturation a bit between this pic and the next one, because increasing the contrast made me look too yellowish.)
Step 8: Fix the stuff around my head. Like that bloody ear, for example. The simplest thing to do at this point is to invert the selection, so that everything but my head is selected. Then I simply fill in around my head. The Clone tool is helpful here. You can use it to copy certain parts of the picture over other parts. It was easy here, because around Peter's head it's mostly black. But in the Lost pic above, I used it to copy the foliage to fill in areas around my had.
Step 9: Blend the edges. It's too easy to tell where the pasted image starts and ends. We can fix that by blending around the edges of my head. I use a variety of techniques to do this. In this case, I used the Color Replacer to replace some of the lighter color around my head, and the Push tool to push some of the color from my hair into the surroundings. Then I made a new selection around the border of my head and went to Effects/Blur/Soften to soften the edge.
Step 10: Fill in details from the original pic. This is where it's helpful to have a second copy of the original pic. I arrange the original next to the version I'm working on, and then use the Clone tool to further blur the edges of the selection and fill in details. In this case, it looked a little weird to have blood all over everything except for my face, and my face needed a more glossy look. I used the Clone tool at 30% opacity to superimpose some of the detail from Peter's face onto mine.
And that's all there is to it. I should actually probably add an 11th step, which is: Leave it alone for a day and then come back to it. If I had done that, I probably would have noticed that my face still seems a little fuzzy and has a sort of odd, two-dimensional pastel-painting sort of look to it. Really, the 2nd to last pic is better than the final one. Oh well, I guess that will teach me not to do these pics at the last minute.
Now that you know how to do it, you can insert my head into all kinds of photos and post them on your site! What? Oh, yeah, your head would work too. Whatever.
Get your captions in tonight. I'll post the poll with Mrs. Diesel's and my favorites tomorrow. Have fun!
Listed on humor-blogs.com.
Labels: Caption Contest, Doctored Photos
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