Na'vi avatar from your photo - Tutorial

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Na'vi avatar from your photo

Narration transcript

How to manipulate photographs with RealWorld Paint and Photos.

Did you ever wonder how your Avatar on Pandora would look like? Let's find out.

First, I'll remove the ears with the Clone tool. Activate the tool, press and hold the CTRL key and click to designate a reference point for copying. Then paint as you would with the Brush tool to copy pixels from the reference area. I'll just copy some hair, where the ears used to be. If you need to change the reference point, use the CTRL key again.

Now, I will deal with the skin. Duplicate the layer. Run the Colorize effect on the original layer and select an appropriate shade of blue. You cannot see the effect yet. Select the Decrease opacity tool from the Tool presets popup. This tool will allow you to make holes into the duplicated layer and the colorized background will appear. Use this tool to re-color the skin. Adjust brush size, hardness and flow as needed.

This part is a bit boring, so let's fast forward.

We are now interactively creating a blend between two layers the original and the colorized photo. The current tool (ALPHA_BRUSH) is used to control the transparency of the upper layer. Note that the current color is black - if you change it to white, the tool will actually undo the previous action and restore the normal skin.

At the end, I'll decrease the flow to 10% and make the hair near the face slightly blue to simulate a light reflecting from the blue skin.

Let's remove the pink regions around the eyes. Switch to the upper layer and activate the Retouch tool. Set its mode to Desaturate to make the pink color grey.

Change the mode to Brighten and make the eyes slightly brighter.

Next on the list are the darker stripes, let's call them Na'vi camouflage. Create a new layer and place it between the two existing layers. Use either the Lasso tool or the Shape tool in version 2013.1 to draw the stripes. Using Lasso is faster, but you need a steady hand. And so I'll use the Shape tool, because it allows me to fix inaccuracies. If you are not sure how to use the Shape tool, look at my other tutorial about it. Draw 5 ornaments on the forehead using black color. Adjust the shapes as needed.

Change the layer blending mode to multiply and lower the layer opacity. Use the Brush tool with transparent color and small Flow value to nicely blend the stripes in.

Keep adding more ornaments on the skin. Note how the ornaments are under the clothing, because the new layer is between the two other layers. When you are happy, merge the three layers.

Switch to the Shapeshift tool. This tool allows you to adjust shapes. Choose the Expand mode in the configuration panel, adjust size and strength and increase the size of the eyes. The switch to the Push forward mode and keep adjusting the eyes.

Now, let's recolor the eyes to yellow color with the Retouch tool. Switch the tool to the Colorize mode and select yellow color. Restore the pupil with a black brush and add some reflection with a smaller white brush. This is not the best way how to draw an eye. Perhaps I'll dedicate one of the future tutorials to just eyes.

I'll adjust the outline of the face with the Shapeshift tool configured to a larger size. My goal is to make the face a bit thinner.

In the final step of this transformation, I will add glowing dots to the face to make it look even more alien. I'll use a Brush tool with small diameter and small Blur to add a few white dots into a new layer. I'll configure a layer style for this layer and it will contain a shadow effect with white color. Strength and size of the shadow depend on the size of your image. Few more dots and the retouch is complete.

Techniques demonstrated in this video can of course be used to make smaller adjustments to photos, like skin smoothing or increasing or decreasing size of a body part.

Thanks for watching.