the first couple is on one side a portrait of actress and super model Leaticia Casta made at the legendary Harcourt Studio and on the other side the headshot of a young Bob Dylan ( from the cover of the album " The times they are a changin'")
I thought the mix of Laeticia's pose and Dylan's attitude could be interesting. I used a combination of different selection tools to extract the head, mainly color range for the hair part and polygonal lasso for the chin. then a little bit of feather and copy paste. then resize and rotate to the final size and position. I used the clone tool to remove a little bit of the background head that was still visible. Then the difficult part began. To have something credible the "texture" and the lighting have to be consistent. I smothed bob's skin ( duplicate layer, gaussian blur , mask and a soft brush ) and then recreated the lighting effect on the face. that type of "1930's Holywood" lighting is very classy but is also very complex. I just used the lasso tool with a large amount of feather and the luminosity / contrast tool to recreate highlights and shadows. I then used the levels tool and a bit of sepia to try to better match the general tone of the studio shot. I then extracted a piece of Laeticia's shoulder and pasted it on top of Bob's chin. Voila!
the other couple I found was the iconic picture of a young Yves Saint Laurent ( the famous french fashion designer ) shot by Jean Loup Sieff ( one of my favorite photographer ) and a recent portrait of the Dude ( a k a Jeff Bridges )
I basically used the same techniques for this one. As Jeff's picture is color I translated it to B&W using the hue/saturation tool pulling the saturation to 0 ( master chanel ) . Jeff's picture being significantly sharper I also softened it with gaussian blur. making the lighting match was a lot easier on this one.
OK this was fun. I wish I could pay the bills with a job like that ( but I don't have much hope...)
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