How to Swap Heads in Photoshop

Sometimes you don’t want to spend hours creating the perfect image, you don’t want to carefully fix every small mistake and make the most convincing photo collage the world has ever seen, sometimes you just want to stick someone’s head on someone else for humorous effect. Here’s a quick and simple way of doing just that.

Swapping around heads in Photoshop can be great fun.

We’ll use Batman and Robin as an example, the proper Batman and Robin, Adam West and Burt Ward. We’re using the caped crusaders for two reasons:

1) Because they both have very different colours and shapes in their heads and bodies, one is larger and all dark colours and wears a cowl, the other is smaller and all bright colours and just has an eye mask. This makes them a good example of changing heads on two very different individuals.

2) Because sixties Batman and Robin are cool. They just are.

Open your image in Photoshop, in this case we are going to swap the heads, it works much better when the backgrounds to the two heads is similar. Use the crop tool to select a square around one of the heads, copy it and move the copy over the other head. Resize and tilt the head so it roughly matches the head you are replacing, ideally make it slightly larger. Select the eraser tool, a brush size about a quarter the size of the head you are replacing, and a soft edge to the brush, about 30%. Now use the soft eraser to delete the square edges around your replaced head. If the background is similar you should get away with the two background blending, as we have here with Batman and Robin.

Repeat the above steps for head two, erasing as close as you can to the edge of the head, but remembering not to actually erase any of the head, just enough of the backgrounds to blend the two together. It won’t win any awards, but it takes less than 30 seconds and if you are just trying to send a jokey email image, it’s an ideal little trick.

[Image via Russ Payne]