Transformation Diary: Manipulated Me
The change occurred overnight. It did not sink in right away.
Realizing what had happened, it took a picture in the mirror. Would anybody believe what happened?
It got dressed, and waited by the window, steeling its resolve, working up the courage to exit its home, unsure of what was waiting for it outside. No longer human, would it still be a part of society, or would it be outcast, a plaid freak with no place in the world? At least it would finally be cured of its nail-biting habit, one way or another.
Leaving home, it looked around, amazed at what it saw - everyone around it had also transformed as well, appearing much as they always did in its inner vision. Whatever had happened was not restricted to itself; apparently the whole world had changed. The peculiar thing was that nobody else seemed to notice that anything was different. It began to worry. Was it the only one who remembered life before this, or was its memory of its human past the delusion? Worse yet, was this reality the delusion, brought on by too many years of fantasy and introspection? Or perhaps the slightly nervous unease was because everyone was going through the exact same thought process, nobody willing to question that which seemed normal to everyone else. It decided that answering these questions would be difficult and would likely result in more problems for itself; it would leave well enough alone, and live in the world where it belonged.
Tuesday morning I liked the way the light was streaming through my bathroom window, and since I'd been thinking about photo-manipulations again (after messing around with it for the first time in over 10 years the night before), I thought that if I'd somehow been transformed overnight, this is probably the situation in which I'd realize what had happened. Then I'd start to wonder, "Now what?"
The hardest part about doing a photo-manipulation seems to be getting the edges of skin to look right. I can see why most photo manipulations are of the furry sort — it's a lot easier to cover over that stuff when you're putting fur over everything, rather than trying to recolor smooth skin. It's also very easy to fall short by not accounting for skin's tendency towards specular highlights, and also the subtle textures introduced by the camera itself.
If pressed I will show how these images were put together, for anyone else who is interested in this sort of thing (you will not have to press very hard). While this is far from amazing high-quality work, it might still be helpful for someone else.
Transcript
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The process I settled in on was basically:
1. Modify the photo with clone stamp and healing brush (applying the modifications to a new layer rather than to the original photo, to make it easier to adjust them and back out and the like)
2. Create a layer group for 'skin' with a mask corresponding to all of the visible skin. This mask is probably the single most fiddly part of the whole process, since it needs to cover all the skin but blend into the background convincingly
3. Within that layer group, have one or more multiply layers for skin coloration (separating the /// and \\\ stripes out into their own layers makes it much easier to deal with), and on top of that another group set to 'linear dodge (add)' which contains the following, from bottom to top:
- A copy of the merged modified photo (this could probably be done with a smart object)
- A hue/saturation adjustment layer which just cuts out most of the saturation
- A levels adjustment layer which boosts the shiny parts of skin into the white while cutting everything else out
- A 'linear dodge' layer filled with noise (ideally taken from a dark portion of the photograph), with a very low opacity, just to fill in the not-quite-perceptible camera noise that you don't notice unless it's gone, since the coloration process destroys that. This is especially important for darker scenes; it made a huge difference in the first two (although I didn't bother with the other two since the scenes are bright enough that there's no appreciable amount of noise).
4. Add other adjustment layers with masks to modify the hair color. Most hair recolorations work well enough with just 'levels' adjustments, but some also require hue adjustment, which should be done sparingly because Photoshop's hue manipulations are ass.
The masks I mostly build up rough with lasso and flood fill, and refine with brush and eraser (set to airbrush mode) and smudge.
The coloration on the multiply levels needs to be full-bleed into the masks. On the pictures with just me I used a solid color layer for the red since that's easy to deal with. On the bus I just used the lasso to select large swaths of area covering people and flood-filled.
The main thing is that the underlying photograph matters a LOT. Having bright, hard natural light makes it a lot easier to keep the lighting on the skin convincing, since hard contrast and shininess help to hide the fiddly issues with diffuse and transmissive lighting.
I wanted to construct tails for people as appropriate but I had a hard time actually doing that in an at-all convincing manner.
and here's the layer setups for the second and fourth images:
(the second one is a bit more complicated than I described since I was still trying to figure things out)