How to morph

Morphing is often done by just cutting and pasting body parts from an image to another. To get a more realistic effect, you need to match the size and skin color.

In this tutorial I have used the following two images:

and morphed them to

Here’s how you do it:

First save the first two images to your computer. Open terminator.jpg on Photoshop.

Using Magnetic Lasso tool select Terminator’s head. Like this…

Now press Alt+Ctrl+D for feather,enter ‘3′ and click OK.

Open TomCruise.jpg and using Magic Eraser tool erase the blue background completely. Now using Eraser tool,erase Tom Cruise’s head.

Your TomCruise.jpg should look something like this…

Now go back to Terminator.jpg (make sure Terminator’s head is still selected) and press Ctrl+C. Go to TomCruise.jpg, create another layer and press Ctrl+V.

With the new layer selected press Ctrl+T for Transform tool. Now pressing shift, resize Terminator’s head to fit Tom Cruise’s body.

Your image should look something like this…

Now you may have noticed that the head and neck skin colors do not match. Here’s how you fix that…

First go to Layer>Merge Visible to merge all visible layers. Now press Shift+Ctrl+U to desaturate the image.

Press “Q” to turn on the Quick Mask mode. Or click at it on the toolbox. Now select a soft brush.

Press Z to select Zoom tool and zoom on the black and white image. Now select any color and paint the skin (both head and neck). Do not paint Terminator’s sunglasses and hair for now.

You should end with something like this…

Now zoom again on the image, and with the eraser tool erase every part that you painted wrong. With more accuracy this time.

After finishing this. Press “Q” again. You’ll see a selection of everything you painted. That’s what the quick mask does. Go to Select > Inverse. Now Ctrl+C on your Layer(with the selection appearing), create another layer and Ctrl+V.

After the Ctrl+V, the image might be in a wrong position, if so, position it right again. Then, with this new layer selected, go to Layer > New Adjustment Layer > Color Balance.
Mark the “Use Previews Layer to Create Clipping Mask”.

Press OK.

Play around with the color balance settings to paint your image. It’s a good idea to mark “Preserve Luminosity” on.

I used the following settings:
Shadows: +52 +41 +43
Midtones: +86 +70 -14
Highlights: +100 -19 -18

The skin color is now the same for the head and neck. Now repeat the same procedure for the hair,sunglass and dress.

You should end up with something like this…

You can change the shirts color to any color of your choice.

I hope that you enjoyed the tutorial. Feel free to ask me any doubts by commenting here. Thanks.

Up Next: How to make the Matrix effect