Morphing Tutorial using Photoshop!

Hello people! In this tutorial we are gonna see how to morph two creatures and blend their skin to make it look real.

So lets begin, first we will see what we are going to create. So here is this strange creature.

STEP 1

First we need two images to morph, for this tutorial i selected two images

1] Elephants [download]

2] Lizard [download]

STEP 2

Now we will start off chopping the elephant’s head, lets take the head of the smaller elephant. To crop I chose a pen tool and went through the edges of the elephant’s head and made a selection. This is how you do it

here using the pen tool i went along the edges of the elephant’s head, you can go into more details by adding more anchor points (anchor points are those dots on the path). Now after you create the selection you have to right click inside the path and select make selection, then copy and paste it on the lizard image.

STEP 3

After pasting on the lizard layer you will have to right click on the elephants head layer on the layers palette and convert it to smart object. Then hit CTRL+T and match it to the lizard head.

This is how we convert the elephant head to smart object, it greatly helps in maintaining the quality after cropping.

STEP 4

Now that we have transformed the elephant’s head on top of our lizard we will create a new adjustment layer and control the hue and saturation for the elephant’s head to match it to the lizard. So yeah hold alt and click the “create new fill and adjustment layer” select the hue and saturation and enter the settings shown below.

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STEP 5

Create a new layer and name it skin, in this layer we are going to make the scales of the lizard on the elephant’s head. For doing this we will quickly grab the clone stamp tool and select sample all layers and then hold alt on the lizard’s scales and using a soft brush put it on the elephants head. Make sure you are on the skin layer which you created now!

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After adding the skin my image looks like this, if you don’t get this in one shot keep experimenting with the clone tool and hardness of the brush till you get it somewhere close to it. So here’s my image (TIP: Make sure the sample all layers is on)

STEP 6

Once you have added the skin you will need dodge and burn tool to make the shading on the head as you can see there are various parts of lizard’s body where there is a shine. Then create a new layer on top of all and fill it with the color (#336600) and set the blending mode of this layer to overlay. So here is our final result.

Hope I have covered everything in detail, If anyone yet has a doubt feel free to leave a comment and I will reply.