Remember: The variations are endless. Here is a variation of the same picture without the eyeballs. It also gives a great effect.

Step 1: Choosing the right Photograph

There are a couple of things to consider when choosing a photograph. First off you should save a digital photograph with good resolution. The original file for this photo was taken straight from a $50 dollar digital camera and the file size was 425K. Now this would be no good for a website. It would take a user on a 45k modem a long time to download this photo but we will adjust the size and the resolution after we are done manipulating it. The final file size will be suitable for putting on a website.

You should also consider the elements of the photo. In this photo I wanted to remove my head and when we do that we don't actually remove the head from the photo we just paint over it with the same colors and textures of the background. So I chose a photo with a background (in this case the walls behind my head) that was soft and not of a distinct pattern. If the walls were striped it would be much more difficult to do. You would have to exactly match the stripes.

So lets begin by opening up the original picture. Here is a thumbnail of it:

Continue on with the tutorial