Be honest. Does this look fake?

[bella_alien]

I took a pic of my cousin and added myself to the pic, just to test and practice my photoshop skills. And here comes the problem. The outlines are kind of giving it out that I am quite literally a sticker stuck on a picture. Let me show you what I mean. This is the photoshopped picture:

The outlines of my face and his face are completely different.

How do I make the outlines of my face look a bit more blended in and natural like my cousin’s?

 

[Argos]

Hi, seems a like a good match and the blending is good, about the outline, just erase a little bit of the white and then add some shadows to both faces were they touch, adding shadows its always complicated and more if you're starting, but it will be a good practice..

Cheers!

 

[Rich54]

On the image of you, when you cut out your face you need to use more feathering or a softer brush so that the blurriness of your face (outline) matches the blurriness of your cousin. Also, maybe try to very slightly reduce the contrast on your face. The shadows on you seem deeper than the shadows on him—but only a little. Otherwise, your image looks pretty convincing.

 

[ultras1312]

Erase on the other face where the outline goes with a brush on low flow amount, check how that goes and see what you can improve more..adding shades is also possible in this case

 

[thebestcpu]

Hi Bella_alien
Very sweet picture.
I think you are right that the outline that you brought up was the biggest issue and that has already been covered by other forum members.
I will bring up two more issues that are secondary for you consideration.
1) Most of the image is a flat single dark single color. I took the original image, set the eyedropper to sample one pixel with "0" tolerance and most of the image was selected. I turned on quick mask so you can see what was selected in red. This does not make it fake looking at the level of tone you chose yet just wanted to make sure that most of the image has zero tonality. That would become more obvious if you wanted to turn up the exposure:



The second factor is the the texture of the two images is definitely different. This is easily identified by putting in a curves adjustment Layer and moving the white point down. The issue is that your face is much more blocky what your cousins has a totally different look. The source of your issue is that your image was too high of a JPEG compression setting which creates these little squares. So the mismatch is very evident. Either you would need to adjust one image or the other to get a better match and if you had a better starting image of you that would be better and easier. The screenshot I took was at much higher magnification of your cousins eye and your mouth so you can see the difference:



Hope these extra comments are helpful
John Wheeler