I want to make a single greeting card with a person’s face superimposed on another picture.
I don’t know anything about any graphics software, don’t want to spend weeks learning to use photoshop, and don’t want to pay for it, either.
There must be a free, easy-to-use program out there. What do you recommend?
Details:
I want to take a jpg picture of an egg.
And put a jpg picture of a person’s face on it.
(an egghead! Get it? huh? huh? huh? Really funny, it is. Trust me.)
So I need to crop the pic fairly precisely, and scale the pic to match the egg.
Is this possible?
To download something ,learn to use it, and make my photo—All in an evening, while having fun and not getting frustrated?
Professional quality not expected… Neither in my photo, nor in the recipient’s sense of humor.
Gimp is free. Can’t judge how easy it is to use- depends what you are used to- but there are a bunch of video tutorials online, including on loading pictures into different layers, masking and blending them.
If it doesn’t need to be highly precise, then it would be trivially easy (and take 10 seconds or less) on virtually any photo editor that exists. Try any of these for Windows or any of these for Android.
GIMP is one of the better image editors out there, but in my experience it has a bit of a learning curve. Once you figure it out it’s pretty powerful.
I personally would recommend Paint.Net. This is not the Microsoft paint that comes with Windows, but it is free. My personal take on it is that GIMP is more powerful, but Paint.Net is much more intuitive and user-friendly.
To superimpose an image in Paint.Net, just open one of the images up, then save it under a new file name so that you don’t end up permanently overwriting it when you’re done fiddling with it. Now create a new layer, and set that new layer’s properties to Multiply, and then open up the second image and copy/paste it onto the new layer. You can resize it, etc. to fit exactly how you want over the first image. You can also play around with the brightness/contrast and other things of the superimposed image, which might be necessary depending on what your two source pictures are. Once you have it the way you want it, merge the layer down, and save your new image, and you’re done.
Alternately, instead of setting the new layer to Multiply, you can leave it as Normal, but then you’ll have to carefully crop around the photo you want to overlay since it will completely obscure anything that the photo covers. Which way is better depends on exactly what each photo looks like.
See, you just described a needlessly complicated way to do it. How to do it in a windows photo editor:
1.) Open the two photos.
2.) Choose the “lasso” tool and draw around the part you want to copy in the first photo.
3.) Choose “copy.”
4.) Touch the second photo (to make it the one being worked on.)
5.) Choose “paste.”
6.) Position cut-out.
7.) Save image.
10 seconds or less. Really. (If you aren’t trying to be ultra precise.)
(Android apps are different and more clumsy to work with more than one image at a time–you are better off with Windows programs.)
(Of course, if you need to resize anything, that does need extra steps.)
For basic stuff, I still use Paintshop Pro 4.12 from a bazillion years ago. I ain’t saying what to do with the Google links…
Here’s a post that has some steps for an even more realistic face swap with Paint.Net. Simple lasso/copy/paste is fine for quick work, but it will be very obvious. With very little graphic skill, I was able to create a realistic picture in 20 minutes.
Note that it requires some free plug-ins you can download from here. I highly recommend these to anyone who uses Paint.Net.
The above method is more complicated, but not “needlessly.” If you want a picture that actually looks like an egg with a face, you need to use some feathering and layer merges beyond copy/paste. If you want a picture that looks like a cut-out face pasted onto an egg, then your method is fine.
I was going to suggest finding someone to do it on Fiverr which would seem to cost very little. But since you’ve had two offers to do it for free in this thread, that approach would seem redundant.
I’ll leave the suggestion in case it’s useful to some future doper.
Everyone seems to be assuming the OP is using a Windows OS environment (or a cell phone?). On the offchance that someone reading this, either now or in the future, has a similar question or situation but is using MacOS, I recommend GraphicConverter. (You’ll never use Photos/iPhoto or Preview again).
