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Morphing Lesson #4: Creating a morph that actually matches your story
This is both a morphing lession for my free side...and a gallery posting for the not-free one. Hopefully, this won't confuse anyone.
When looking around for a picture to morph for Sara - from Interlude Four: "Stress Test" - I had some very specific...specifics in mind. The character as described (at least, in my mind) was Asian. The scene the picture was going to had her on a bed. She was also a Doctor doing research - as well as a test subject for that same research - so she wasn't going to be running around in frilly lingerie nor wearing jewelry nor having a well styled hairdo. She also had to be mostly nude and not doing something silly like making porn-faces at the camera or something.
Oh, and she had to have giant breasts...but I could fix that one, it's what I do.
These requirements proved remarkably hard to find out there. In fact, I skimmed around on the web (and through my collection) for almost a month with really no luck.
Finally, I chanced upon a girl named Carla Maria. And she matched my eye's view of what Sara should look like. Here's the picture I finally picked (click to see full size):
Notice any problems? Well, not in the girl herself - she's damn hot. But she's damn hot wearing makeup, a lot of it...and jewelry...and heels (why do nude pics always have women in heels, even in bed. It's just dumb)...and that sure ain't a bed she's kneeling on. The tattoo didn't exactly scream "biological researcher" either.
But she fit what I was looking for...and you work with what you got.
So first thing, I had to remove her makeup, jewelry and tattoo and get down to a (naked) Carla Marie before she dresses up for the photo-shoot. That took a lot of cloning, careful airbrushing, and some color changes here and there. And what I got then was this (click on to see full size):
Yes, that's what Carla probably looks like in the morning getting out of bed. Such a disappointment...not.
Anywho, now I had my "cleaned up" Carla to work on, it was time to give her some huge breasts...as that was the whole purpose of the exercise. Fortunately, I found a pair of Rachel Aldana's that fit the bill. They were the right size and firmness for match "Sara's" tonic swollen boobs and both of them were at sufficiently the same angle in the picture that it was a very simple clip out & paste job.
Mind you, matching the skin color of a tea-colored Asian girl with a cream-colored English one was tricky...and then there was some work on the top and side of them (in the "Sara" image, the breast on the right side spreads more up and to the right than it does in the original image - area filled with Rachel-arm theer). But all in all, a fairly simple paste job. The trickiest bit was getting her arm right, so I copied an image of her arm, put it above the pasted in breast and then just trimmed it till it just covered what it should.
Color matched, pasted and then some airbrushing brought me to the first picture that I could call "Sara" (as always, click):
At this point - had this just been a simple morph - I would have stopped. Heck, if all I wanted was a sexy girl with huge breasts, I probably wouldn't have worried about the jewelry and makeup removal!
(well, maybe on her eyes - she's got it on much too heavy for my tastes)
Anywho, for an illustration for Stress Test, there was one more thing she needed: To be on a bed.
A quick image google found me a bed at the right angle that looked like it might be in a dorm room (the setting in the story) - if, in a dorm room of someone with a lot of money and free time to decorate. So now it was time to put Sara to bed.
Collapsing my layers on the "djbe-sara01" image, I then roughly cut Sara out of the picture and pasted her on the bed. Once there, she was too small (unless the bed was twelve feet long) so her size needed to be adjusted. Actually what I did, was adjust the size of the bed rather than her so as to avoid creating any new "artifacts" on her. She also needed to be flipped horizontally to fit the bed, but that was no problem.
Now, remember I said I "roughly" cut her out? I had to go back, zoom way in, and carefully erase all the "not Sara" around her. This took a while...a long while...especially around the hair. There, I had to erase best I could, then use color replacer to change the background color of the wall behind her hair to match that of the room I'd just stuck her in. It wasn't perfect, but some cloning and airbrushing (and more erasing) cleaned it up. Finally, a light feather blended her in better.
Then some changing the lighting on the bed. It originally was a very even (and rather bland) lighting, but Sara showed that there was a light above and (now) to her right. So I increased the contrast on the bed and added some highlights as if that light was shining on it too. It's little details like this that can make your morph look real...or totally fake.
Shadows from Sara on the bed were then added, both using the shadow tool and with some airbrushing here and there. Finally the whole mess was collapsed, sharpened, color-corrected, and - because it couldn't take up too much room as an illustration - shrunk down to a "reasonable" size.
But I suspect you don't want to see it at a "reasonable" size, so here's the full-sized finished morph that - had I not felt the need to chat about what I did - you would have reached in most cases by simply clicking on the link in the gallery:
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