Step One

Gather two high-quality images of the people that you want to mix together. Remember to try to get these two images to look similar, as far as the person’s face position is concerned. This will aid in making the final outcome look as real as possible. I thought it would be cool to mix up former President Bush and President Obama.

Obama

Bush

Step Two

Copy one of the images and paste it into the other image. I copied the George Bush picture and pasted it into the Obama picture.

Paste

Step Three

Take the lasso tool and draw around the face that you want to apply into the other person’s head.

Lasso

Go to Select > Modify > Feather and put 20 pixels.

Feather

Press Ctrl+J or Cmd+J to put this selection in its own layer. Delete the original layer where this face came from.

Delete

Step Four

Lower the opacity of this layer until you can slightly see the face below it. Transform and align the top face with the bottom face so that the two faces are aligned exactly. Bring the opacity back to 100% again.

Faces

Step Five

Take the eraser tool and with a soft brush, erase around the facial features (eyes, nose, mouth) so that it shows a little bit of the features of the bottom layer.

Erase

Step Six

Play around with the Levels settings, the Hue & Saturation settings and the Color Balance settings until the color and lighting of the face matches the rest of the background.

It’s that simple. There you have it, President George Obama in six easy steps. Below is my final result. Please note that it doesn’t look perfect because I just did this tutorial quickly just to show you what is possible with Photoshop.

President George Obama

If you liked this tutorial or if you have any questions, feel free to leave your comments below so I can answer them and please re-tweet this tutorial to let others see it as well. Also, if you have any suggestions or ideas about a tutorial that you want, let me know and I will do my best to write a tutorial about that subject.

You can also attach a screenshot of your version of this tutorial in the comments. It would be interesting to see which two people you have matched. By the way, the professionals use this technique as well. Check out this blog post about NFL players switching heads.