This Photoshop tutorial shows you how to wrap a texture to a photo of a face and make it look real.  Learn how to use the split warp and displacement maps in Photoshop as well as contouring to add any texture to any photo. This isn’t limited to faces.

How to add a texture to a face in Photoshop. Colin Smith shows you how to map a texture to a face in Photoshop, this is pretty much how you would do any super hero or creepy monster, or hybrid beast.

Actual written steps coming soon, here is a transcript for now.

And this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to add a texture to a face. Hey, Cafe, it’s Colin here from Photoshop Cafe Dotcom. Today we’re going to do a fun, creative project. We’re going to add a texture to a face. Now, today is my birthday, so you can wish me happy birthday or you can smash the like button into dust.

 

And if you haven’t yet subscribed, subscribe button. All right, let’s get started. So for those of you who hate it, whenever the images in here, we’re going to choose file open. We’re going to navigate to our images, you know, whether you’re on Mac or Windows and click open and they’re going to open in three different tabs. Now, I’m going to give you this image here and I’m going to give you this image here. We’re going to put a newspaper on top of the woman.

 

Now, of course, you could search for your own texture, use any texture you want. In this case, I’m going to be using this Adobe stock texture, which I can’t give you because it’s it’s Adobe stock. You could use the watermarked version if you want. All right.

 

So I’m going to show you how to combine it. I’m just going to click on the image that I want to bring into the face, dragged into the tab. Don’t really see it. You see the how that cursor is blank means it’s loaded with a texture. Release it and there we go. So we’re going to position this somewhere. And there I’m just going to hit control just to make a copy of this just so I have a copy that I can play with later.

 

So the first thing that we want to do is we want to kind of get this to select her face. So let’s just grab that face now, because you could do the whole body if you wanted, or put different textures on there. In this case, we’re going to focus on the face.

 

So why don’t we go to the left hand side here and we’re going to go down and let’s go here and you’re going to see the object selection tool.

 

So we’re going to choose the object selection and just kind of click around her face. We’re trying to select her face. That’s pretty good.

 

It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t have to be. Now, if you don’t see that, you could just go in there and you could use the quick selection tool and do the same thing. In fact, I’m going to hit the shift key and just click on here to select a little bit more of a cheek that looks good. A little bit more. A bit more cheeky. Oh, my gosh, my buttons are really bad today. All right.

 

So I’ve made that selection. And why don’t we turn on a texture layer and in selected and then what are we going to do now is see what the layer mask is. Just click on the mask and it’s going to give a mask of there. Right.

 

So we want to maybe I’m going to scale this a little bit. So I’m just going to turn off that chain link had controlled T for three, transform and drag a corner and let’s just scale it down so we just get a little bit more detail. And I’m just looking for an area that might be nice, maybe about they’re great. All right. So obviously we’ve got this texture, but it’s not matching her face yet. We’ve got to do some things to just kind of follow the contours and different things like that.

 

So first and we’re going to do is drop rapacity down to about 50 percent. So just pull it down a little bit just so we can see the face. All right. And it’s just kind of gives me an idea of where we’re going to be working. In fact, what I pulled out of up because I did say about fifty. And let’s zoom in a little bit. All right. So I want to start following the contours of this face a little bit better.

 

So let’s go in here just with our layer selected notice. I’ve unlinked from the mask. So we don’t want to change the mask.

 

We just want to change the layer head control t that’s Camonte on the back for free transform. And now that you were free transform mode, we’re going to right click and you’re going to see an option that says Warp.

 

Now Warp enables us to work this image just by dragging on it.

 

Now we want to be a little bit more accurate in how we’re doing it. We don’t want to just drag it everywhere. So what are we going to do is we’re going to split it. And if we hold down the alter the option key, you’ll see that we can split this warp. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to split it on either side of Brunos. And I’m going to go on the other side of the nose, we’re going to split it there, and why don’t we divide it just under the eyes?

 

And under the top of the, you know, the eye area here somewhere, basically subdividing almost like we would if we were doing 3D. So I’m going to put one under the nose and put one on the top of the lip on the bottom of the lip.

 

And let’s divide again somewhere near the chin line, but not at the bottom of the chin. But you know where it kind of goes in there.

 

Great. So what we want to do now is we want to start just kind of changing this. So here’s an interesting thing about this. If I hold the shift key in drag, I can select multiple points. And that means I can move these around together. Or I can drag a bird, look at that, see if I go there and now we start to pinch this, which is good, we want to pinch that just a little bit.

 

And let’s go on the other side. We’re going to grab that and we’re going to pinch that and a little bit. So what we’re doing is we’re just pitching it into where the nose is. That’s great. Now just click away to and select. And so if you choose a point, notice how it will move like that. And if you go in the surface, you can move it that way. So let’s just bring this up a little bit on the eyes, on the cheeks, as do the same on the other side there.

 

In fact, I just said the alky. Just give us another point just so we kind of, you know, working with similar kind of shapes. All right.

 

So why don’t we just pinch this nose in a little bit? I’m just going to drag in there and just pinch that and do the same on the other side. And you’ll see these little handles over here. You can use those or you can drag however you want. And all I’m doing right now is I’m just kind of dragging it up to just kind of get a little bit more contour of the face the out again and create another one just so I can flare out these nostrils a little bit.

 

There we go. So you might want to drag up a little bit for the cheeks and just kind of work, you know, where you think that the contours would be, let’s salute both of these.

 

I’m just going to hold down the shift key. Let me click away and select these two. And if you do that, you can bring them up together. See that? Let’s bring those up a little bit. And hold down hopes, not the output, let’s do the shift key again, you’re going to go down there and it’s just bring it bring it up. So we’re just trying to shape that a little bit. Same with here, let’s hold the shift key and we’re going to bring this down.

 

And what we’re doing is just trying to fit in here a little bit. All right. So we’re getting we’re getting there. So I would just say, you know, just keep playing around until you get something that feels good to you. This kind of drag that out a little bit. Spread it out on the floor here. It’s definitely looking better, let me hit the out of the option key, and I’m just going to create a little square here around the eye area.

 

So I’m going to shift click to select all of these, and I’m just going to drag it in and see what I’m doing Dragnet Corner and just pinches it endlessly, the same thing on the other side. And this is almost like 3-D modeling. I don’t know if you’ve ever done any 3-D modeling, but it works kind of like this, basically pushing and pulling polygons and we’re doing a kind of similar thing.

 

OK, so let’s just hit enter to apply that. And if we turn our capacity all the way up, you’ll see it might be a little hard to notice at the moment, but we can get it to start to match the face a little bit better. So we’re just kind of bending it and warping it and but it really makes sense when we really put it together. So the next thing we want to do is we want to create a displacement map.

 

And this is just going to pick up a little bit more of the contour. So in order to do that, hide the layers and select just our face here, just the face layer. And then we’re going to go to the channels and we’re going to go for the channel that has the most contrast. Just click on the red, green and blue. Usually it’s blue. And in this case, of course, it’s blue. So what we want to do is we want to create a new document out of this channel.

 

So right, click where it says blue, and then we’re going to choose the duplicate channel. The duplicate channel option is going to come up and for destination, we’re going to choose new and we’ll call this face mask, no pun intended for covid and we’re just going to click, OK?

 

And what that’s going to do is it’s going to give us another document. Here’s our document we’ve been working on, and here’s the new one. And if you look under that image mode, you’ll notice that this is multichannels, so it’s just a single channel and this is what we want. This is how we’re going to create a displacement map.

 

So what we want to do is we want to enhance a little bit some of these contrasts.

 

So we’re going to make sure that we hit the control alt for levels and then we’re going to boost the highlights a little bit. We’re going to boost the shadows a little bit and it just kind of increase the contrast. So that’s what we’re doing. We go for maximum contrast, click, OK. Now, sometimes you can blur this, you know, to get rid of the micro texture, but in this case we’re going to be fine and we’re just going to save this.

 

So we’re just going to choose save as and we’re just going to call this Demet for displacement map click.

 

OK, great. All right. We don’t need that anymore. We can turn it off. And here we are back in our document in the channels and we want to just go back to normal. So just click where it says RGB on the words igby. All these I should come on and our channels now back to normal.

 

All right, let’s go back to our lawyers panel. And now we’re going to go up to the top here and we want to select our texture. And we’re going to apply the displacement map to it now, so we’re going to choose filter. And under filter, we’re going to go down to. Distort and then across the world is displaced. And we’ll just keep the default settings of 10 and 10 click, OK, and now I’m going to ask for that displacement map navigate to where it is.

 

That’s when we created the map and click open and watch the image, see how it just kind of moved around a little bit. Let me show you that before. And after so that is going to work to fit the face and you’ll see this when we go into changes to a blind mode, let’s try something like, I don’t know, maybe an overly bland mode.

 

And you can see how these contours now are really starting to match the body.

 

So the next thing we got to do is we just want to mask away the areas around the eyes and the lips. So let’s just zoom in a little bit and hide out there and see what we’re working with here. So there we go. We can see we’ve got these eyelashes going in there. So we’re not going to get rid of those. Those will probably appear in our image, but we just want to make sure we’re just looking at what we’re working with.

 

Great. OK, so let’s select that layer. Let’s go to the mask, click on that layer mask right now.

 

And now with this lame mask selected, what we’re going to do is we are going to paint with black. So I just connected my welcome on tablet here, I’m going to hit the beef, Abrash.

 

And make sure that we hit the deck to reset the foreground background colors and then hit the X key that’ll say black, and that will enable us to paint into this mask with black and that will hide those areas inside the image, make sure opacity is all the way up to one hundred and flows up to one hundred where a normal blending mode also click on the brush options if you’re using a tablet, turn off transfer.

 

So that means when I paint now, I’m going to be painting at 100 percent capacity without any paint pressure. All right, I’m just control option t UniMac, and if I drag up or down, it changes the hardness left and right changes the size. If you’re working on Windows, that’s the out right drag. All right, so we’re just going to paint over here. We want to paint away our eyes. And you might want to come in a little bit closer so we can get this nice it hard.

 

Let’s get busy, it is nice. And the blending mode should enable you to just kind of see through nicely. And if you wanted, of course, you know, you could, you know, change the opacity, if it helps, you just kind of lowering capacity. But I’m just looking to kind of get it in there and I’m looking to go around the edge of the eye. Rate. And what I’m going to do is I’m just going to make this a little softer, so I’m just going to drop this flow, though.

 

I’m just going to have to shift I want to drop the flow down to 10 percent, and I’m just going to blend it onto the island. So it’s not going to be quite completely gone, but it’s going to be more done. So just kind of blending that in a little bit and blending these edges. All right, let me hit control zero and you can see the first is done. Let’s do the second day and we can start with that blending if we want.

 

Just painting on there. This time, this is just kind of blended in a little bit. So it doesn’t look so abrupt. All right, let’s go to our high capacity. And turn out flow all the way up. And let’s paint this. Great. So we’re just allowing that eye to show through. No, I’m in pretty close and I’m I’m doing this pretty tight, you could probably be a little looser and get away with the. All right, so there’s the eyes.

 

Let’s go down here, are we going to do the same thing on the lips? I’m going to soften the edge of the brush a little bit. And we go. And maybe make that brush a little smaller. There we go, and now I’m just painting and on the lips. Because that would look a little weird on the lips. And see what we’re doing here. We’re just blending that in. Great, and maybe we’re just going to get in here into the nostrils a little bit.

 

You know what I’m going to do, though, let me undo that on a drop the flow down a little bit and we’re just going to paint that a little bit more subtle. So we’re just going to just blend that and more. See that? So we’re not going 100 per cent, but we just kind of blending it in. There we go. Great, and let’s do a little bit on the eyebrows. I’m not going to completely do them, we’re just going to just reduce it a little bit so we can see a little more eyebrow coming through.

 

Maybe a little bit more the. And remember, you can experiment with different blending modes. You don’t have to be using overlay mode, which I’m using right now. All right. That’s looking pretty good. I just want to get in here on that mask here and just make sure we get these edges a little bit better.

 

So let’s turn that flow all the way up. And I’m going to paint with white. And I’m just going around these edges. There we go. Let’s just get those a little smoother. Now, this is kind of optional, what I’m doing here, and if you wanted to add the ears and you could, I’m not going to. Spacebar enables you to move around while you’re painting. And I just want to soften that edge a little bit, just a little too harsh.

 

All right, so we’re getting there now.

 

One of the things we need to do, though, is we need to add some shading. And this is really going to make this look more realistic. So we’re going to go on top here and we’re just going to create a new layer. And what I’m going to do is I’m just going to link that layer with its mask and we want to use that mask. So if I hit the out of the option key, notice this little arrow appears and if I click, it will clip this.

 

So let me show you what that means. If I paint with black notice, it only affects. Inside that area, because we’re constraining it now by clipping it great and let’s drop out Flowtown, I’ve dropped it down to about. 10 percent, let’s see how that looks with black as the foreground color. Let’s make sure a precious soft. And I’m sorry to drag it back, so now we’re just going to paint a little shadow around the hair where the hair would be just falling on the face.

 

See, by doing that, it starts to look a little bit more realistic now. To the same on the other side, I’d get a little bit more dimension. And we definitely need to take it away from that area where it’s going on the ear, so in order to fix that, just flip that around it white and just paint with light, OK? Because we don’t want that over there. That’s going to look strange. Great.

 

Probably putting the newspaper on the. It would be a good move, too. All right. So let’s continue. I’m just going to now do some contouring on the face. So with black selecta, let’s create another layer. Before we do, let’s change this normal mode to multiply Moad.

 

And just play around that capacity, see what we’re doing, just getting that shade of their nice. And, you know, we could go in and fix that hair selection, which I would recommend if you want to make it look really good. Let’s create a new layer, clipped that in there. And now we’re going to paint in some shadows. So we’re at 10 percent flow and we’re thinking, OK, where would shadows come in? Well, if we look here on the side of the nose, we definitely would see some shadows kind of coming in there.

 

Under the brown line, and this is where this is going to start to really come alive. So you can see a big difference already. To put some of that shadow in there where that shadow would be just kind of hitting her a little bit under the nose. Great, and let’s make that a little smaller. We’re going to put some under the lips because you’ve got a little bit of contour there. Let me make that a little bigger, because it’s getting a little too soft.

 

There we go. That’s better, great. So where else might we see this, we might see a little bit of shadow in here around the edges of the eyes. Great, and maybe a little bit at the bottom of the chin, so let’s just put just a little bit there at the bottom of the chin. Great. So now we’re going to flip this around and we’re going to paint with white and the four heads are going to get blessed with a bit of light.

 

Don’t worry if this is looking too much, because we’re going to fix this in a minute and we’re going to go down the middle of the nose. Boom. So that’s where a light would be hitting and top of the cheeks here. But there it’s almost like I’m doing country makeup right now. All right, now, what are we going to do is change the Blende mode about shadows and highlights, it’s going to overlay blind mode maybe that see how that looks?

 

Yeah, that looks nice. Is giving us a little bit of texture there on the face. So there we go.

 

I just showed you how to add a texture to a face. And in this case, we used a newspaper. I mean, you could use any kind of texture. The steps in the process are exactly the same. So now this was something a little bit different, more along the creative kind of avenue this time. Let me know in the comments underneath, if you like this kind of creative direction. You know, we were just kind of doing a project or if you prefer, just the basic tutorials, let me know.

 

And by the way, if you like to smash the like button into dust and if you’re new here, welcome to the cafe crew.

 

Hit that subscribe button and you’ll get a new tutorial from me every single week. All right, guys, until next time, I’ll see you at the cafe.

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