Doing the PS-CS3 Dance

Doing the PS-CS3 dance

So my assignment is to select a picture of myself, select the head, copy and paste it and superimpose it on one of the dancers. I have some issues with this assignment. The first is that I need to lose about 100 pounds before I take head shots. Otherwise, Rita or Ginger will look like The Incredible Dancing Woman With The Balloon Head. The other issue is with hair. Right now I have really short hair, kind of spiky on top. Both of these dancers have hair down their back or at least on their neck. How am I supposed to blend my spikes with their do’s?

I found some old pictures of myself from back in the day that I had long hair. Some of them are almost in the right position, but not the right lighting. So I first tried putting my head on Rita Hayworth’s body. It was a dismal failure. But I’m posting it anyway so everyone can have a good laugh.

My second attempt I used Ginger’s picture. But instead of putting my whole head on, I just selected my face and superimposed it over Ginger’s face. This solved the problems of the hair, the double chin and the size of my head. But I’m not sure it’s what John intended when he made the assignment.

So here’s a brief outline of my process.

I selected the part of my face to transfer to Ginger. Then I copied it onto a new layer in the head shot photo.

Before I copied and pasted the selection I tried to clean it up as best I could. The head shot has a white/black lace background which made it difficult to quick select or use the magic wand. I had to zoom in to almost a pixel level to clean it up. But it was much easier to do it on the head shot than on the dancer’s picture. And to help clean it up, I made an extra layer just behind my selection layer and painted the extra layer bright pink. This made it a lot easier to see what I was doing. But it’s kind of scary seeing ones face floating in a field of pink.

Once I had it cleaned up I transferred my selected face (still in color) to Ginger’s. Of course my face was as big as half her body. So I used the Transform and Free Transform functions to scale my face down and tilt it to match Ginger’s.

After I had it the right size and position, I changed it to black & white. Then I adjusted the levels to try to get the tones just right. Okay, they’re not perfect but as close as I could get them.

Next I reduced the opacity of my face so I could see Ginger’s hair line. I zoomed in and carefully erased any part of my face that was covering her hair. There is a little bit of a halo effect on her face around her hair (like in front of her ears). I could never get it quite right.

Then I used the smudge tool to blend the line between my face and Ginger’s neck.

Then I sat back and laughed.

Look! It's the Amazing Dancing Woman with the Big Balloon Head!!

This is the 3rd version of this one that I've posted. I keep trying to get the head smaller and look more proportioned to Rita's body. So now nobody needs to be embarrassed about theirs.