Choosing A Picture:

The first thing you need to do is choose your picture. "That's easy!" you say, "I have a hard drive FULL of women I'd like to see bigger." Au contraire. As soon as you start working on a picture, you'll pretty quickly discover whether you made a good choice of material or not. After you've worked on lots of pictures, and finished some of them, you develop an eye for what's a good starting picture and what isn't. How to judge the difference? Well, unfortunately, that depends on where your talents lie, so I can't give you a definitive answer on that one. A big key is "Are you a good digital painter?" If so, then you have some different options available to you that a pure photo-editor wouldn't even contemplate. You'll pay a small price in realism (unless you're very, very good), since people will be readily able to tell what part of the picture is original and what part is painted, but all in all, painting is the most powerful tool. If you're beginning, however, you're going to stick to the basics for a little while at least, and there are some tips you can use to choose your canvas:

  • The top half of the woman's chest should be as unobstructed as possible. If she's holding her own boobs, or even if there's hair hanging down over her chest, it's going to make things a real pain in the butt later on. For your first pictures, stick to shots where everything's clear and in full view. If you don't already, you'll understand more about why later on when we get to that part of the tutorial.

  • Choose someone who isn't completely flat. This is where being a painter would help out - if you're strictly working with what you have, you'll need some curves to enhance. If she doesn't have any, it's really hard to create them. That's what the digital painting part is all about. Keep in mind: Shadow is what defines a 3-dimensional form. (and sometimes highlites, but usually shadows) A circle is flat until you shade in most of it, leaving a highlight on one side and a deep shadow on the other, then it's a sphere. The same is true of breasts in a picture. If you're working on a clothed picture, pay close attention to the lighting, and make sure you already have some nice curvy shadows on the underside of her breasts. You'll almost always need to do some shadow painting later on anyway, and the idea here is to minimize that work.

  • Be careful with the 3/4 profile pose. This is where a girl is almost turned completely to the side, but not quite. You can see both shoulders, and one breast poking out from behind the other. You have to be careful of this pose because it's very easy to enlarge the whole chest at once, and you'll end up with a bosom that just looks... wrong. The breast in the background looks bigger, and looks like it starts out in a funny place in space, making the chest look like it's turned at a different angle from the rest of her torso. It's about the angles that they hang off of the chest wall, and it's about perspective. If you were to enlarge each breast separately, you can make it look right, but this is only easy in nude pictures. If you're working with a clothed one, beware of this pose. I've made this mistake before, and I'm warning you so it doesn't happen to others as well.

Once you've chosen your source material, it's time to start building better boobs. There are 3 basic types of breast-enhancements available to the photo-editor.

  1. Clothed model enlargement
  2. Nude (or topless, at least) model enlargement
  3. The "Frankenstein" (or "transplant") method

The first two are fairly self-explanatory. Most of the basic techniques in those two are alike, though there are some details that are different. The third type is the kind of picture you make by taking the breasts from another picture and attaching them to the smaller-chested model to make her look bustier. It's an electronic transplant. This technique has its advantages and disadvantages, and it requires both a reasonable command of the other techniques listed here, as well as a sizeable library of big boob pictures. But more on that later.

Before I get started on the nuts and bolts of this operation, I'll pause and mention a few handy hotkeys that you'll find yourself using over and over again in Photoshop. If you've been using Photoshop very much on your own, you probably already know these, but glance through anyway just to be sure...

  • Spacebar - The most necessary hotkey. While you hold the spacebar down in Photoshop, whatever cursor you have selected changes to a hand icon. While you hold down the spacebar, you can click and drag your mouse to move around in the window. This is to replace using the scroll bars on the right and bottom of your picture when the picture is too big to fit in the window. It's an incredibly handy way of moving around.

  • Ctrl-Alt-Drag selection - Once you have an area selected (with any of the selection tools), with your mouse still playing the part of a selection tool (crosshairs or lasso icon), hold down Ctrl and Alt on your keyboard. You'll see your icon change to two arrows, one barely visible behind the other. Still holding those keys, if you now click inside the area you've selected and drag that object somewhere, you'll see you've made a copy of the selected area that you can drop anywhere else you want. There are times when you want the copied part to end up in its own layer - usually when you've copied a chunk of the picture so you can mess with it - but there are other times when you just want to make a quick copy of a region, and you don't want to deal with the extra layers. An example is when you've scanned in a picture and you're cleaning off the dust specks. You find a speck, lasso-select a similar-sized area right next to the dust, then ctrl-alt-drag that area on top of your dust speck. If you've selected wisely, you'll find the dust speck is now invisible. For that example, I recommend zooming WAY in (like 500% or more) so you only copy the pixels you absolutely need to. When you zoom back out again, you shouldn't be able to tell you did it.

  • Ctrl-+ and Ctrl-- (that's ctrl-minus) - Speaking of zooming, that's the hotkey to do so. It's easiest for me to use the plus and minus keys on the keypad at the right of my keyboard. Just hold down the ctrl key and hit plus or minus as often as you need to zoom in or out, respectively. You get 100% zoom with each keypress.
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