The Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA)
has a sculpture that has fascinated me ever since I saw it for the first time
many years ago. It is a marble statue of
a veiled lady. The fascination lies in
the fact that the artist was able to use a solid matter, marble, and create a
statue that shows the transparency of a veil in total detail.
I have photographed it on several
occasions and recently thought if it would be possible to replace the face of
the woman in the statue with that of another individual, especially one that makes eye contact with the viewer. This is not an attempt to improve the
original, that would be preposterous, but strictly an exercise in the
application of Photoshop skills.
Photoshop offers so many possibilities,
I am reasonably sure that there are more than one way to accomplish this. I am certainly not saying that my way is the
only way, but this is what I did.
The first task was to find an image in
my files for a face to replace the original.
For this is selected a picture from a model shoot that I did in the past.
Next there was the necessity of rotating
the image to the same angle and to match the size of the model’s face to that
of the original. This is a trial and
error approach because of the different sizes of the face. I found it easiest to use the “lasso tool” to
mark off the rough area to be superimposed onto the original. After arriving at the correct amount of
rotation and the correct size, I removed the layer of the superimposed face
from the original and then carefully outlined the area of the model’s face that
I wanted to transfer onto the original.
The next step was to change the colored
image of the face to black and white and then using color correction to match
the color of the superimposed model’s face to that of the sculpture. Working
with the two layers makes this a relatively simple task.
The next step was to merge the superimposed
layer with that of the original. After
that I used the “spot healing brush” in the “content aware” mode to blend the
harsh outline of the model’s face with the rest of the image.
The final step was to use the original
image side by side with the new one and then use the “clone stamp tool” with
only 10 percent opacity to carefully paint the detail of the veil onto the new
image.
You be the judge of how successful this
has been.
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