So for our face swap project I decided to go with Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man from “the amazing spiderman” movies. I did so for a few specific reasons. The first being the obvious, being a super he has a lot of qualities that many people would admire. Kind and brave, always being ready to help people even if it puts himself in danger. Also very intelligent, both in the movies and comics spider-man is always shown to be very smart in many cases working along side professors, in the movie he even makes his own webbing material. But there’s also a reason I went with this particular spider-man and not either of the other 2 representations we’ve gotten of him in the past few years. To be fully honest the reason is because this particular version is how probably many people my age would act (including myself) if we got his super powers. He’s cocky, sarcastic, sometimes selfish and a little bit arrogant. He had faults that go beyond the normal super-hero tropes. He wasn’t a goody two shoes do nothing wrong knight that we typically see in comics and cartoons when we’re kids. And that is one of my favorite things about this particular spider-man, because I know very well that even though I would try my best to help people and be as heroic as possible. I would still have my days where I’d be a 24 yr old kid who can do some cool sh*t.
The actual process of the face swap was pretty difficult. First I tried using the original tutorial provided in class, and I also tried using the one linked below. But there were a few issues. the first issue being the angle of the face, because neither of the faces are looking off to the side there isn’t enough face “content” to fully do the method in the linked tutorial which basically has you cut out the shape of your face from the face you’re replacing and using photoshop’s auto-merge tool to have it blend it for you. With the original tutorial the problem that I had was that the skin on the spider-man picture is quite a bit darker because of the shadow but it also had a lot more dark red in the tint almost as burgundy basically. So I ended up doing a little bit of both with a pinch of my own blending using masks to try to get the skin tones to blend into one another and transition rather than to change my skin tone completely. I would be able to explain it to another student but I feel that it would have to be something that would be hands on and face to face. I don’t think I would be able to explain it very well over text for the simple fact that I kept going back and forth on which style I was using depending on what part of the face I was working on. For the tutorials, strictly speaking on the way they convey the message, I definitely like the second one way more because even though both had pictures I felt as if though the second did a better job and showing pictures of every single step, which for me in a Photoshop tutorial of all things is a MUST.
linked tutorial:
https://clippingpathindia.com/blogs/tips/photoshop-image-swap-blend-technique-10-easy-steps