» Skull Face Photoshop Tutorial- tutorial blog

Ever wanted to change someones face in a photograph to a skull ? Lets face it, who doesn’t ? This is the tutorial for you then, we take a lovely top-hatted woman and turn her into a grim reaper-esque figure.

Starting off with these two photos, both from istockphoto (that site is getting better and better btw, so go grab yourself an account and stick some credits in as we will be using photos from there a lot in future).

Using the magic wand tool on 30 tolerance and anti-alias, duplicate the skull image click the black area and press delete, you now have a lovely cut-out skull. Drag this onto the woman image and click edit > free transform :

Rotate the skull round so its the same angle as the face, then right click the layer in the layer window, select blending options and take the opacity down so you can see the face underneath :

Now select the background layer, and draw an elipse roughly the diamter of the rim of her hat. Then select edit > free transform and match the selection to the angle of the rim of the hat and delete it :

Delete the other bit of the skull that the elipse didnt get and bring the opacity back up to 100%. If it didnt match the hat rim exactly, no problem, just grab the eraser brush and tidy up any bits that look odd :

Doesnt look like the skull goes under the hat does it ? Lets add some shadow to make it look a bit more realistic, right click the layer, select blending options, then choose inner shadow and play with the settings till it looks ok, these are the settings I used for this image :

It should now look like this :

The skull looks like it goes under the hat now, but we can see some human skin on the left and we cant have that. Zoom in to the area and select the clone stamp tool :

Hold down alt and click on an area close to the skin on the hair, then move over the skin and click again. Do this a few times to cover up the skin with cloned bits of her hair :

Once thats done, we need to alter the human skin that you can see around her neck area, draw a rough selection around this, press ctrl+c and then ctrl+v to paste that selection on a new layer :

On the menu, go to, Image > Adjustments > desaturate, then Image > Adjustments > Hue/Saturation and use these settings :

And thats it, one hat-wearing, skull-faced person, isnt she lovely ?

You can also download the psd for this tutorial.