Stargazer's fake tutorial

Well, this is the part I most suck at. However, I'll do my best.

Take a look at the original pic. See where the sun is coming from? See how the top of the tits shine and there's shadow below? We're going to try and duplicate that on our fake.

Start with a new layer. Grab an opaque brush and set it to white. Draw a streak where you think the shine should be. Not too big. Something like this:



Now go to the filter menu and select blur --> gaussian blur. Set the blur to something that looks good. I have it set to 11.1. Now adjust the opacity of this layer to something that looks good. We don't want it too garish. Mine actually looks pretty good at 100%, but yours may not. Turn the layer on and off to see the difference. If it's bleeding over into areas you don't want, apply a mask and remove some of it. But be careful!! You'll get brush strokes and blotchinesss very easily. When you're happy, merge it down.



We'll add some shadows next.....

 

Ok, shadows are tricky. The shadow under her tits won't be the same shape as the tits because of the angle of her midsection. Also, shadows tend to be sharp or fuzzy depending on the angle. Look at the bikini on her right tit in the original picture. The bottom left half is in shadow. It's still white, but not as white as the upper part. There's also a shadow on her ribs. My attempts are bound to turn out badly, but I can show you how to do it and perhaps you'll be better at it. So let's roll up our sleeves can give it a whirl.

Start with a putting a mask on your faked layer. We'll do one at a time. Open a new layer. Click on an area that looks like a good color for a shadow. We can adjust later so the color and lightness are not super critical. Use the paint bucket and fill your layer with this color. Put this layer below your faked layer. Now grab the lasso tool and select an area which should be in shadow.



Now right click on the paint bucket and select the gradient tool. Set it as I've shown here



Make sure the mask is selected. Now stroke up and to the right a bit. Looks terrible? Try again. The idea is to have the area below the tits dark and have it gradually fade out as it goes up. Play with it until you have it. Don't worry about the arms and other areas. Just get the gradient right. You can press Ctrl-H to hide the marching ants. There should be no discernible edge on the tits.

Next step is to remove the shadow on the arms and stuff. Just brush it out in your mask with a white brush. Don't do anything yet except clean up the edges. Now use your color tools on the shadow layer to change color and lightness of the shadow. Also, adjust the opacity of the shadow layer. When you adjust the opacity, some of the layer below is going to come through. Easiest way to fix this is to make a duplicate of your faked layer, right click in the mask and delete it and move it below your shadow layer.

With a VERY soft and transparent brush, soften the edges of your shadow and remove anything that doesn't look right. Here's mine:



I'm not going to do the other tit because I suck at this. But you should get the idea and be able to apply it however you like. The whole purpose of this method is to get the gradient. Photoshop does this better than you can with a brush, so if you can do it this way, it looks better.....

 

It should be noted that I would never have chosen this donor pic for this fake. The donor was done indoors with side lighting and the shadowing makes it horrible to work with. If it was a tough pose to match, I might have used it, but this is an easy pose and it would have been fairly easy to find a better match with the lighting. I saw this before I selected it, but the question I'm most asked is on color matching. So, I decided to use this poor choice so that I could demonstrate some color matching techniques. As soon as I masked out the bathing suit, I saw I was in trouble. In retrospect, I probably should have used a better match because as far as I'm concerned, it still didn't turn out very well. The lighting was SOOO bad in this donor that I was unable to properly adjust it. Maybe with more practice. So, make sure you spend the time to find a good match. It'll save you a lot of work and will make your fakes look more realistic.

I used a lot of different techniques for color adjusting, lighting and shading. Actually these are all interchangeable and we could have use any of them at any point. I used different techniques in order to demonstrate some of the ways of doing it. Every requirement is different and it's good to know several different ways of adjusting colors, shadows and highlights so you can choose the one that works best. Here they are in a nutshell: make a copy of the donor pic, adjust the color and brush it in OR make a separate layer and fill it with the color you want and brush it in OR do the same thing but use the gradient tool instead of a brush OR draw in some lines and blur them. You could also combine them such as adjusting a copy of the donor pic and using the gradient tool on it. Remember that the gradient tool is used on the mask, not the picture. You're after a smooth transition from black to white in the mask.

Okay, that's as far as I'm going for now. You should be able to apply these methods for your own fakes. There's an infinite number of ways to accomplish the same thing and you'll undoubtedly find other ways. Don't be afraid to experiment. And if you have some tips that would prove useful, post them here. I'm always looking for better ideas too!!!

Have fun!!

 

This is really great! Thanks for taking the time to explain how the magic works.

I can't wait to try it out...

 

I'm glad you found it useful. Let me know how you make out.

 

I try fakes here and there and I found this very insightful! I will try this on a couple in the next few weeks from the fake request board when I have time. Great job!

 

Have you posted any thing in the see through thread?

 

Thanks. I know you've done some fakes as well, so free to share what you've learned.

 

I have on occasion, but the quality of pics in the amateur xray thread is horrible and C-Through is the master in the celebrity xrays, so I mostly just stick to the fakes.

 

This step is by far and away the most time consuming and difficult.......And the biggest reason I don't do a lot of fakes......people just don't appreciate the time and effort it takes to find a good match.......All of the above must be considered..... I appreciate all of your fakes and This tutorial.... Some good suggestions I haven't considered......

 

Amen to that. I spend hours looking for the right donor image when I am doing a FakeRay, to which all of the same fake development principles apply. A realistic Fake or FakeRay is an art form that we artists need to make a huge time investment.

 

Great tutorial. Saving all this for when I have time to try something like this out.

 

how bout for facials?

 

a GIMP 2.0 tutorial in the future would help considerably i can translate things from CS-GIMP but not all the features are there and i dont have $900 for CS5

 

The features used are pretty basic and I'm sure GIMP has them. There is an advanced content-aware feature of photoshop that gimp likely doesn't have, but I presented an alternate way of doing it using the clone stamp and healing brush and I'm sure gimp has something similar

 

I haven't gone through this full tutorial, but it looks like GIMP is used.

http://vincent.freefakers.com/vangoghs/turorials.htm

 

very nice indepth tutorial, will come in handy when im messing up my blending, thanks