Altering Reality

For this assignment I decided to place my face into the movie poster for V for Vendetta as Natalie Portman. I have been told that I look similar to her by friends and strangers alike so I thought it would be an interesting experiment to place my face into a picture of her and see how similar we looked in the same context.

Below is the original image, with my edited image directly to the right.

For this image I first selected the area of Natalie's face and after taking a photograph of myself in light as similar as I could to hers, I cut a portion out of my face and pasted it into the selection I created. I next adjusted my face image's color balance. Finally to smooth the edges of my face and blend thm with her skin I used the eraser with a low opacity to get shadows from the original image to pop through to my face and then used varying amounts of the smudge, burn, and clone tools to fix any imperfections. All that was left then was to add the new names to the image. I replaced both actors' names so my own would not stand out as too crisp. I accomplished this by adding text boxes to a new layer and rasterizing them to the image.

As for how similar we actually look I will leave that opinion to the reader...


UPDATE: I further increased the highlights on my face to match those on the original poster. Below is the improved image.