'An eye for an eye': Cut and paste collage technique

In this tutorial you can learn how to replace some elements from one image with any elements from another image, a general cut and paste mash-up. I will be focusing on replacing a woman’s eyes with a cats in this example. This works best if the images are similar in head position and lighting.

We will cover the basics of cutting and pasting with various tools, as well as selective burning and dodging of the images tone and color. Rotation and scaling will be used to match the right angle.

These are the images used:

Step 1. Make a selection of the cats eye with either the pen tool or the polygon lasso. Be sure to select everything you want and it may be a good idea to make a larger selection and later on erase what you don’t need. Copy the cats eye and paste it onto the document you will be merging it with, the face.

Step 2. Now transform the eye and match it to the face. Using the Edit-Transform-scale/rotate option you can position and orient the eye to the correct place. It may even be beneficial to skew or use the perspective transform here as well. Some additional erasing or blurring may be necessary to complete the illusion.

Step 3. Now that the eyes are in place you need to adjust the lighting. Using the burn/dodge tool play with the options and burn in shadows and mid tones to create an even light that seems to be on both the face and the eye. At this point you can either merge the layers together or work on the burning/dodging using the layers separately. I prefer to keep the layers on their own and leave the merging to the last moment and then do one final adjustment to them as a whole. That should do it!

Tips: Play with the final color of the eye or face using the hue/saturation option or work in some selective coloring to highlight certain areas.

Also using the various layer blending modes with a duplicate layer on top of the original can add some interesting tonal variations and make the image have a more stylized look, for my image I created a duplicate of the final and added a slight gaussian blur then applied a blending mode of screen to that layer.

Some cloning of the original image to extend the eye lashes may be good, or even creating some new wrinkles. Don’t stop with just the eyes, apply this technique to any other image and create some wild looking digital collages that would even make Bob Ross proud!