Drachen's Morphing HowTo  

One of the questions we are most often asked here at the site is "How did you do those Big Nose morphs?" and "What software do you use?" We have used everything from Windows Paint (in the very early days of the site), to better more suitable packages. Some we use are Kai's Power Goo, a popular picture deformer, Stoik Deformer, an  inexpensive and powerful alternative to Power Goo, and a guest contributed a picture with Elastic Reality, the premier professional morphing program.

The technique I use for making long-nosed women uses just Adobe Photoshop, one of the most popular, widely used and powerful picture editing programs available. Why don't I just use a morphing program you ask? Most of the currently available shareware and more inexpensive morphing programs simply aren't worth the effort of using them. Only the more expensive, professional packages produce what I would say is passable output. (And on a student budget, it was either PS or ER) Well, enough with the chatter, how do you do the !@#$ morph? Ok, Ok, here goes (note: there may be a little wait time, depending on the speed of your connection): The instructions are for Photoshop but the techniques should be similar in other photo-retouching programs.
   

How do you turn this picture:	Into this long-nosed version?:

The most important thing for any morph is to pick a proper picture to morph. In order to make a long nose, a profile picture, like the one above is definitely best. If you don't have ready access to a scanner (and I don't) you may be forced to take images from the Web. In most cases, they are badly dithered and very grainy. To reduce that you may have to smooth the image out. Just use "Gaussian Blur" at 0.5 and then do "Sharpen Edges." Now comes the most difficult and time-consuming part of the morph:

My tool of choice to do the morphing itself is none other than the smudge tool. After the more experienced graphics artists dry their eyes from laughing, I will tell you that this tool is quite useful and quite powerful when used correctly. First a little setup: In the menu, click on File, then New Layer. Name it "Nose Layer". Now click on the Smudge Tool and in the Smudge Tool Options set Pressure up to 98% (so that the nose doesn't fade out at the tip) and check "Sample Merged". Make sure "Nose Layer" is active and start smudging away. Sample Merged makes the two layers smudge like one, so its a good idea to take it off after you have gotten started on giving the nose its new shape, as mistakes can easily creep in at this point. I ended up with this:

There are very few tips I can give you on how to make these morphs look good, as most of the work is artistic in nature and I really don't consider myself much of an artist, but here goes:

• Look at where the light is coming from and pay attention to the shadows on the original nose. The light and dark areas can make or break the image
• Use the feathered (fuzzy edged) brushed first to start to extend the nose and then to do the shaping and touch-up work, use the solid brushes
• Try to get the shading slightly more pronounced that it would have to be in the final image. We are going to have to have to do some work with the nose to make it more "real", and it will dull the colors slightly
• "Touch-up" work is deadly. Before you do anything save it!
• If you don't have the right brush for the job, make it!
• Most of all, practice, practice, practice

 Now, you may have noticed that the nose looks "fake", in fact, like it was smudged. We need to fix that so it looks closer to the grainy texture of the photo. We are going to use the Noise filter. If you are happy with the nose shape and shading, save it before you do anything. The Nose Layer should be highlighted when you use this filter. You may have to play around with the amount a little depending on the quality of the photo (Thank goodness for previews) . For this one I set the amount to 22 and I used Uniform noise. Gaussian noise is a little heavy for this pic and monochromatic is much more useful for black and white pics than for color. Here is my result from the filter:
   
 
  Not bad, but it seems a little too noisy to fit in the picture quite right (note: this is much easier to tell when the magnification is higher, I can't put bigger pics here because it would clog up bandwidth). The next step is to Use the Blur More filter:

Yow! That was just too much. It looks almost as bad as the smudged picture above did. Well, In the Filter menu, choose: Fade Blur More. In the dialog box, move the scroller until the nose "seam" seems to blend with the original nose and you should be all set. I set mine to about 50% for the final fade.

I hope you enjoy using and improving on this technique. If you have any suggestions on the page, my work or any cool techniques you would like to share, give me a buzz.