How to Replace Faces on Movie Posters

In this tutorial I will replace the faces of Jessica Alba and Ioan Gruffudd with Paris Hilton and Leonardo DiCaprio, respectively. The original picture is a movie poster (from Fantastic Four). It’s generally easier to replace faces on movie posters than regular photographs because they are already airbrushed so its okay if the final doesn’t look completely natural. The same principles can be applied to when you apply a different face on a photograph that isn’t a movie poster — It just takes more time, effort, and precision.



This is the first source picture. Below is the picture of Paris I will be using to cover Jessica alba’s face. When you change faces, make sure they are both at the same angle.



Select the face area without any hair. Make sure you get some of the neck so we can blend it in with Jessica Alba’s neck. Feather the selection 2 pixels so we get a smooth selection.



Paste it on the first document with the source image. You can tell here that the 2 images are great matches and the angle of their face is almost identical.



Now resize Paris onto Jessica Alba’s face.



That looks terrible. First of all, Paris’s neck is on top of the shirt and Alba is a bit Latina, isn’t she? Paris doesn’t have the same skin tone. Use the brush with these settings to darken her skin: (Use a color from Jessica Alba’s face in the source image)

Now to fix the shirt problem. Hide Paris’s face layer and select the shirt as closely as you can.



Make it visible and on the Paris Face layer, hit delete.



You can tell Paris is alot darker now, but the color doesn’t match up exactly. So go back to Alba’s face and select a midtone like the one below.



Make a new layer and fill it with this color. Set the Blend Mode to Color.



Select Paris’s face (but stay on the color fill layer), go to Select Inverse on the Select Menu, and hit delete. This is what you should have:



With the eraser tool, also delete the color from her eyes and lips so that you can see their color.



Now for Ioan’s face replacement, I will use this picture of Leonardo DiCaprio
.


Using all the same steps, copy and apply the face onto the original document. Since they have very similar skin tones, I didn’t darken or lighten his skin like before. I just pasted and resized with Free Transform.
The difference between their faces and the movie poster faces is that the movie poster has slightly higher contrast. If you go to Brightness/Contrast you risk ruining the quality of the picture. A milder way to raise the contrast is Curves. (It’s on the same menu as Brightness/Contrast)
I applied a setting like this.



Then I did the same for Paris’s face.



Here are my final shots.

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