Merging isn’t just for making panoramas. One of the Elements-only tools that Adobe gives you is Faces, a fun (okay, let’s be honest—silly) feature that lets you merge parts of one person’s face with another person’s face. You can use it to create caricature-like photos, or to paste your new sweetie’s face over your old sweetie’s face in last year’s holiday photo. Figure 11-5 shows an example of what Faces can do.
Figure 11-5. Faces is really just for fun. You can create composite images like this one, and then use Elements’ other tools to make your photo even sillier, if you like.
Although you’d be hard put to think of a serious use for Faces (it may work for something like copying a smile from one photo to another image of the same person with a more serious expression, but the result may not be top quality), it’s fun to play with and simple to use:
Choose the photos you want to combine.
You need to have at least two photos open in the Project bin before you start. You can Ctrl-click/⌘-click to preselect the photos you want to include.
Call up the Faces window.
You can get to it either from File→New→Photomerge Faces, or from Guided Edit→Photomerge→Faces.
If you didn’t preselect images, a dialog box asks you to choose the photos you want to include. In the Project bin, Ctrl-click/⌘-click to select the photos you want to use, or click Open All in the dialog box. Elements then opens the Faces window, which has a preview area on the left and an instruction pane on the right.
Pick a Final photo.
This is the photo into which you’ll paste parts of a face from one or more other photos. Drag a photo from the bin into the Final area (the right-hand preview).
Choose another Source photo if you don’t like the one Elements selected.
This is the photo from which you’ll copy part of a face to move to the Final image. Double-click an image in the Project bin, and it appears in the left-hand preview area. You can copy from many different photos, but you can work only with one Source photo at a time. (When you’re done working with a Source photo, just double-click the next one you want. That way, you can use the ears from one photo, the nose from another, and so on.)
Align your photos.
This step is really important, because otherwise Elements can’t adjust for any differences in size or angle between the two shots. Click the Alignment Tool button in the Photomerge Faces pane, and the three little targets shown in Figure 11-6 appear in each image. (You may need to move your cursor over a photo to see them.)
Figure 11-6. To tell Elements how to align your photos, drag one of these three targets over each eye and the mouth in each photo.
Position the markers over the eyes and mouth in each photo. (If you need help seeing what you’re doing, there’s a little toolbox on the left with your old friends, the Zoom and Hand tools, so you can reposition the photo for the best view.) Then click the Align Photos button, and Elements adjusts the photos so they’re the same size and sit at the same angle.
Tell Elements what features to move from the Source image to the Final image.
Click the Pencil tool in the Photomerge Faces pane and, in the Source photo, draw over the area you want to move. In a few seconds you should see the selected area appear in the Final photo. You only need to draw a quick line—don’t try to color over all the material you want to move. In the Options bar, you can adjust the size of the Pencil tool if it’s hard to see what you’re doing, or if it’s grabbing too much of the surrounding area.
If Elements moves too much stuff from the Source photo, use the Photomerge Faces pane’s Eraser tool to remove part of your line. Watch the preview in the Final image to see how you’re changing the selection. If you want to start over, click the Reset button at the bottom of the pane (you may have to scroll down to see it).
When you’re happy, click Done.
Elements creates your merge as a layered file. Now you can edit it using any tool to do things like clean up the edges or to manually clone (The Clone Stamp) a little more material than Elements moved. And you can make your image even sillier using the Transform commands (Transforming Images), the Liquify filter (Applying the Liquify Filter to Text), and so on.
You can adjust two settings in the Photomerge pane:
Show Strokes. If you want to see what you’re selecting with the Pencil tool, leave this checkbox on.
Show Regions. Turn this on to see a translucent overlay on the Final image, which makes it easier to tell which parts you’re copying over from your Source photo. This is just like the regions options for Exposure Merge, which you can see on Manual Merges.
It would be nice if you could use this feature to merge things besides faces, but it doesn’t do a very good job of that. Even for faces, if you’re doing something important, like repairing an old photo with parts from another picture of the same person, you may prefer to do your own selections and then manually move and adjust things (see Moving Objects Between Images). But the Faces feature’s alignment tools can simplify the process enough that it’s worth giving it a try to see if it can do what you want.