Blog Entry 3: Completed Face Swap

This is my finished face swap! I swapped a selfie of me I took while running with the great “American Gothic” by Grant Wood. I choose this painting, because I thought it would be an easy face-swapping choice, due to the characters looking head on. Also, I have always seen this piece throughout my education, teachers have used it in my high school and middle school classes and I have always liked it. It is an accurate representation of an average farmer couple in the 1920s. To do this, I first took a cross section from the forehead on the man in the original painting, then copied it over to the picture of me running. I then took a cross section of my own face and blurred both of these cross sections so that they were one solid color. After this, I used the curves tool to edit the RGB channel outputs and created a new curve layer which masked the background picture of me running in a colorway that more cleanly overlapped with that of the painting. I then deleted the cross sections and combined the picture layer with the curve layer and took a new cross section of my face which I transported over to the painting. Here, I adjusted the transparency of my own face so that I could line it up correctly with that of the painted man’s face. Next, I made a face mask and erased all unnecessary parts of my face cross section, then put the transparency back up to 100%. Lastly, I took many new cross sections of the painted mans face and overlapped them onto my face, then stretched and morphed them to fit my face better, and I made them very transparent so that they would blend into the overall picture better.