Intelligent Scissors Artifact

Antoine McNamara
4/17/2002

For this project, I had originally planned on cleverly compositing the two most evil people in the world together into one picture, Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein. It would have been a shocking statement, a visceral damnation of U.S. Foreign Policy and a call for all Americans to take responsibility for the established U.S. policy of supporting dictators and despots. Unfortunately, spending about 30 seconds with google, I found the following photo:

Foiled again! No intelligent scissors needed here...

Back up plan: stick your TA's head on a funny body.

aseemDance.jpg

Step 1

Find a picture of your TA and of a dancer (this one taken from a Paul Taylor dance sequence used by said TA in a previous project).

watermugweb.jpg dance.jpg

Step 2

Using Intelligent Scissors Tool, load the TA's image.

step2.jpg

Step 3

Zoom in and select the TA's head, intelligently.

step3.jpg

Step 4

Once the Alpha Matte has been extracted, "feather" it to create soft edges.

step4_1.jpg
step4_2.jpg

Step 5

Export the foreground matte of the head, and load it into Photoshop, along with the dancer picture.

step5.jpg

Step 6

Copy the face image to a new layer in the dancer image.

step6.jpg

Step 7

Use the "Free Transform" command to scale and position the new head above the dancer's body.

step7.jpg

Step 8

Adjust the Hue/Saturation to match colors between the two sources.

step8.jpg

Step 9

Lastly, apply a Gaussian blur to replicate the motion blur from the video sequence and touch up the neck area with the Eraser tool.

step9.jpg

That's It! Fun for the whole family... Once again, the final result:

aseemDance.jpg