How to make a half face before and after head shot

I really didn’t know what to call this post. The best I could come up with is: “How to make a half face before and after head shot”. I am doing this post because Delila seemed to think it looked pretty cool and there were a few people that commented on how I took that photo.

Some people thought I just cut off half the mustache and then put a line on the picture. Other people thought there was some Photoshop magic where I some how aligned half my head to another picture of half my head and combined the two pictures.

No one has guessed correctly yet. Basically I had two photographs taken. I tried getting Delila to take them at very similar focal distances, lighting etc. Even that the first picture was taken 6:00pn Nov 30th and the second picture was taken before going to bed. You might think that lighting alone might have made things hard enough let alone that it’s almost impossible to duplicate the same smile or facial features.

Here’s the two pictures that I used for this little mock up.

*Note* – Please don’t try to laugh. It was for a good cause

One thing I used that I find really helps is a Wacom Tablet. I just have a Bamboo which is the smallest and cheapest of the tablets. It does have pressure sensitivity which is REALLY nice!

The first thing I did was look at the  two pictures. The right hand side is a tine bit bigger picture then the left side picture. I figured if I could just mask in the left side mustache then I would get the best results since my eyes were not aligned etc.

Here’s what I did:

First thing I wanted to do was to get my skin tone to look similar in the right side. It’s got a bit more red in it as well as more mid skin tone color.

I made the tones a little light by using curves to brighten the picture. I masked out (hid) what I just did with the curves. Using a white paint brush I painted on the black mask. By painting white I slowly brought in the coloring where I needed it. I used my tablet for all custom tweaks.

Below I pasted the mustache picture overtop the image I was just working on. Because I wanted to try and align things up I took the new layer and made it transparent so I could use the arrow keys to align things up.

I chose getting the eyes and mouth aligned up as close as possible. After that is done you need to bring the mustache layer back to 100% opacity. Once there you need to apply a black mask of nothing to the mustache layer. Again it won’t look like there is even a layer there. Next you need to use a white paint brush and paint in where you want the mustache to be.

Here’s what the layer looked like.

Since I look absolutely crazy here I decided I just put a line down the middle to hide and “mistakes” I had made. I then added the words to the picture as well.

That my friends is how I created the half face, before and after picture.