Photo manipulation in photoshop

An article by Robin Powell    2 Comments

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Photo manipulation in photoshop

This tutorial is going to show you photo manipulation. Photshop is a fantastic tool for photo manipulation as you probably already know.
When new to photoshop things like layers, levels, curves and balance all seem a bit scary, but once you get the hang of them you will see they are a piece of cake!

In this photo manipulation tutorial I am going to show you how to merge 2 animals, a Frog (ok, I know it’s not an animal!) and a hippopotamus to create one hybrid animal. I call it a frogopottomus! The techniques you’ll learn here aren’t strictly for photo manipulation, they can be used on a variety of different projects, By doing this and completing it, you will have a good grasp on many of the tools in photoshop and will be able to use them for lots of other things! I hope you enjoy this photo manipulation tutorial and please feel free to send us your versions!

Onto the tutorial!

This is the final photo manipulation:

Step 1: Images

Ok, So first you are going to need to decide what animals you want to cross! Once you have decided, find some nice images and cut out your 2 animals!

A good thing to do when picking your images is to find two animals in roughly the same position, if not, it will make it harder to look convincing as one animal when you’re doing your photo manipulation.

Step 2: Placing the animals together

Now take the part of the animals you want to manipulate and place them roughly together. One slightly over the other, and using Edit > Transform > Scale try to get the 2 body proportions the same.

Step 3: Colour adjusting

Now that your happy with the proportions of your beast you are going to want to make them the same colour!

Open the colour balance palette using  Image > Adjust > Colour balance

Now, using the sliders try to get the colours of your 2 parts the same.

You wont be able to do this perfectly with just colour balance because you’ll have different brightness so open Image > Adjust > Levels, again, using the sliders get the 2 parts brightness the same. There is no hard and fast rule for this. You just have to play around until you have a match.

Finally, open Image > Adjust > Hue and Saturation, Using the Saturation slider, simply  slide around till you have a saturation match.

By now the too parts should be looking pretty close!

Now with your hard edge eraser tool, clean up all the edges, Then with your soft edge eraser tool set at 50% opacity, gently erase the joins of the two pictures so they merge into one. If you have got all your colour correction done well in the previous steps you really wont need to do much erasing!

Create a new layer under your frogopottomus and name it shadow. Now with a soft black brush, gently draw in a bit of shadow. Easy.

Step 4: Place the image on to a desired background

Merge the 2 animal layers together and then place them on your chosen background!

Your done!!! I added a layer of noise on top of the whole image with an opacity of 10 just to scratch it a bit, but you are pretty much done!

Here is a slight photo manipulation variation.

I hope you enjoyed this photo manipulation tutorial and I hope I explained it easily enough.

It really is easy, like all of the tutorials on this site. The idea is minimum effort with fantastic results!

If you enjoyed this post, why not check out these other tutorials? Click here

Please feel free to comment and share this and keep coming back for more awesome tutorials

Robin Powell