werewolf before and after the moon.

[Usuqa]

For this photo i used the liquify tool in cs4 mostly, with some good old cut and paste with transform, clone stamping.

1) To start with (after you duplicate the original layer), i opened the image in the liquify tool.. I started with his nose/top lip and dragged it forward. I set the tool to a fairly large size and not always dragging with the center of the tool on him but the edge of the brush to sometimes (i also lowered the brush str to around 25). Basicly it was just trial and error for how much to use and when, normally pressing shift/alt/Z to undo some brush strokes and try again till i got a look i liked.

Since the top lip and nose on a dog are joined once i had got the distance i wanted i took care in pushing them together. Next up was the bottom lip/jaw, and also a flattening of head (as the top of a dogs head is very close to there eyes) and pushed his neck and bottom jaw in a little to (think of the shape of a dog).
At this point i took care in shaping the ear.. not worrying to much about how deformed his skull was getting as i pushed the tip of it above his head (as i was going to fix this later). The harder part to was trying to push his cheek back towards his face.. this left massive distortion between his cheek and nose but needed to be done i feel to give more definition to his face (i used the reconstruct mode at a low settings and just took my time... to much of the tool in one place would leave a hole.)

With the the amount of abuse the photo is taking with the Liquify tool you will get alot of distortion in area's but you can fix this later by cutting/pasting and transforming original parts.. you are going mostly for a look/shape just now... it will take alot of different brush sizes and some time but just be creative

2) After you have abused the photo alot with the liquify tool you should have something like this.4289735991_07f047a6f3_o.jpg
*note* this isn't from the original work, i recreated this quickly to give an idea.

I then took his head and made it bigger overall (a box around it and hit free transform), this left some fixing to do around his neck but is easy to fix with some clone stamping/healing. I then started to make copys of parts of his face/head that were distorted the most and place them ontop of the liquefied version using free transform to make them fit and a mask layer with a low power brush to blend them. Parts were like the top of his head (to give hair back instead of the distorted lines we have now.. also leaving space for the pointy ear to show), his chin because the hair there looked very odd, part of his neck. I also copyed his eye (and eyebrow) and placed it ontop and made it bigger.. using the eyebrow to match/join in with his hair.

Basicly your just grabing parts that look bad in the liquifed version and with some transformation and blending putting origonal parts over to give more detail to your photo again.

3) Next up was hair.. for this i grabbed a section of his beard and copyed it into a new layer. I would use this (and rotate it when needed to change the hair direction) to clone stamp hair onto his face. Again i just used a low power brush and my own judgement to what felt right.. I put a little on his new ear (mostly for texture sake you can hardly see it) alot on his new nose (helped fix the look of the distorted skin to) and his cheek blabla.. I guess if your subject has no hair you can take the same sort of sample from someone else :P.

4) After i had the skin/hair done, blended origonal parts of his head onto the new shaped one, the only thing left really was the teeth... again this was done using the liquify tool. The bottom two teeth were done using what was there just dragging it up and shaping it, the top two well.. i copied one of his front teeth shaped it and duplicated it (made it smaller) and placed it.

5)I made a new layer with the soft light priority and 50% grey. This in itself dose nothing for your photo.. but if you take a white/black brush with 2-3% power you can then start to lighten/darken area's of your photo.. So i used this to just ajust the lighting on some things like a few very small strokes to the teeth to make the back ones darker and some random lines in the bottom 2 as they were flat, i lightened the eye and darkened/lightened part of the ear and so on.

6)I then added the moon and converted to b/w.

*tips* just be creative.. and make new layers for any changes you are going to do.. this lets you remove things you have done if the didnt work out the way you planned, for me this was lots of trial and error and time .


im not the best at writing stuff.. or telling people how to do things, but i was asked how i done this so i hope this helps others get started on wolfing some of there friends to.
Thanks for liking my work and im glad to help.

[prabbit237]

Love this one. Makes my edits look like child's play. So how long did you spend on this picture?

[Usuqa]

um.. around 6 hours give or take, but then that also involved a few cups of tea.. talking and some messing around at the wee hours in the morning (3am + didnt sleep that night). I could do it alot quicker now but its still something that would take a while

[JeffSmith]

Stunning, excellent PP work. Thanks for the tutorial. Don't think I'll be spending 6 hours trying this out though, but it's great to see how you did it. I think I would have tried to merge it with a pic of a wolf and not got anywhere near what you have achieved. Well done

[WooD]

Thanks in great multitudes. This is too good.

Now I have to go thru all my hard drives, and see if I have a shot to practice on.

[windrider86]

Very impressive

[Usuqa]

Originally Posted by WooD

Thanks in great multitudes. This is too good.

Now I have to go thru all my hard drives, and see if I have a shot to practice on.

Glad i could help, id like to see what you and others who try this come up with

[JustJim]

Good work and thanks for the details. I thank you, and obviously other DPSers have thanked you and I hope your wolfey friend has thanked you because that is a wonderful treatment that you have given the original photo. Well done!

[Sterling]

That is really great work! Thanks for the detailed tutorial.

[Usuqa]

Originally Posted by JustJim

Good work and thanks for the details. I thank you, and obviously other DPSers have thanked you and I hope your wolfey friend has thanked you because that is a wonderful treatment that you have given the original photo. Well done!

ohh yes, hes thinking about getting a big print done of it... hes helped me out alot in the past so was nice to do something back for him