Somewhat green looking for some help

[MrGreen]

Okay, so i have this dog, and she reminds me of a lion, and i wanted to put her face on the sphinx. i have some memory of Photoshop from high school, about 10 years ago, i am currently using CS6. needless to say i am completely lost. i am just looking for someone to give some suggestions on how to complete my project (i can search tutorials on youtube) so it doesn't look like a hunk of crap. all i have done so far: created a layer mask with the dog face, changed the opacity of the dog face to 48% with the Luminosity selection. I have tried using the clone tool to grab the texture of the stone on the sphinx, as well as the smudge tool, it looks like crap when i do that. its in a pretty raw state, but like i stated i am lost on how to blend in the sharp lines. if anyone has any suggestions on some tutorials i should look up or just any input at all i really would appreciate it.

 

[IamSam]

Hey MrG! Welcome to the PSG!

Great idea. This should be a fairly straight forward composite. It's a matter of blending your dogs image into that of the Sphinx by using a simple layer mask and the Brush Tool. Add a few adjustments layers and it should look pretty good.

Can you post the image of your pup?

edit: We may have to turn the dog to stone first! LOL!!

 

[Tom Mann]

The auto-blend tool in PS can work quite well for such tasks. Here's a nice tutorial:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5SGw8izxMY

Because the differences in structure of a dog face vs a sphinx's face, you will likely have to do more than the usual amount of warping / transforming of the base images to get them in decent registry.

HTH,

Tom M

PS - I just saw Sam's very appropriate comment on texture, so, as he suggested, you may want to first turn the dog to stone (say, using a displacement map technique) before using the auto-blend technique I suggested.

 

[fotograffiti]

you could also try this tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPsjpj4Euww

I made this one, I'm not completely satisfied with the result, but gives you an idea

 

[MrGreen]

Good morning men and women of the interweb. i read your comments last night and was just to drained to get up and look at the monitor. like you asked here is the photo of the dog that i am using. I will have to get to some of the tutorials after lunch. i really appreciate your help!!

 

[IamSam]

I tried both techniques, one with a displacement map and one using the Auto-blend.

Both worked very well with acceptable results but the auto-blend technique as described in the tutorial that Tom provided a link to seems to be the easier of the two techniques.

However, what is not described in the tutorial is a way to improve the stone like texture. That I had to cheat by adding a stone texture layer above the auto-blended layer(s), desaturating, lowering it's opacity, and added a layer mask matching the dogs outline. I then clipped a a Curves adjustment layer to the stone layer to help the contrast. Merge all visible layers.

I then blended the merged layer with the Healing Brush Tool.

 

[MrGreen]

Holy wow that is exactly the tutorial i need