Head replacement in an old photo

IN this tutorial we'll learn to replace the head of one person with another in a photo. This is a fun novelty to try out with relatives.

1-Get photos to work with
Find a photo of a famous person. In this case I found this photo of President Regan with some of his buddies. Open this in Gimp. I then found a Photo of a relative of mine. Open this in Gimp as well.

2-Cut out face

In the relative photo use the lasso tool to create a selection around the face and neck. type control+C. Go to the Regan photo and type Control+V. Then go to the layers palette and right click on the newly pasted layer. Select 'create new layer'. The relatives face is now a regular layer. At this point you will want to save your file as an .xcf image. Save save save. As nice as this program is, it can crash, so save!


3-Touch up
Now the fun part. Go to the color menu, click 'desaturate'. Use the scale tool to re size the relative head to the correct size. Right click on the 'Relative layer' in the layers palette. Select 'Add layer mask>White (full opacity)'. Using a semi-fuzzy brush paint out the parts you do not want on the relative layer. Be sure the layer mask is selected when you do this. (Select by clicking on the box just to the right of the relative layer in the layer palette).
Notice the lighting on the relative face isn't quite right. It would take some seriously advanced techniques to change that. We will not be covering that. However, we will do a simple alteration. Zoom in very close to the eyes. Using a very small brush tip paint in highlights similar to what is on the eyes of the rest of the people in the Regan photo. See below.

4-Conclusion
As you can see below the results are not perfect. But they are not bad either. You wouldn't want it to be perfect either. There are people who do this kind of thing to make money by fraud. Let this be my disclaimer that the intention of this is not to train people in forging photos, but to teach how to create something fun for family and friends. Another idea is to do the reverse of this. Take a famous persons face and replace the photo of an unwanted relative in a group photo. Have fun!