How to add a face to a costume in PSE

Several of my friends have asked how to add their face to a picture in Photoshop Elements (PSE). My saying, “Do this that the other” wasn’t helping a lot since they had NO idea what I this and that and the other were. I’m not able to give individual instruction because I am a Very Small Duck, so I decided to download a trial of PSE and do a tutorial for PSE using a pic that my friend @emmythecat sent.

You can click all the pix to make them large and they open in a new window so you can see them better. This was done in PSE8 for Windows, but since PSE is an Adobe Air program, it should work the same for Mac. PSE6 and other versions will be extremely similar.

First, open PSE and create a new file (File, New).

Paste first the costume and then the face into your new file. They will become separate layers as you can see in the layers box on the right bottom.

Select the face layer by clicking that layer in the layer box on the right. Do not click the little eyeball by it or you will make it invisible.

Use the arrow tool (near the top left) to move the face to generally where you want it. It’s OK if it’s not perfect and it’s OK if you can see the costume under it.

Enlarge your view of the face by using the magnifying glass (2nd icon from the top on the left).

Then use the polygonal lasso tool to select the face only, not anything else. See the red box in large photo for the icon – if needed, click the little arrow in the lasso to choose the correct polygonal lasso.

Choose Select, Inverse from the menu.

Choose Edit, Delete. The photo above should be like what you end up with.

Choose Select, Deselect.

Use the arrow (pointer) tool to pull the corners and resize or tilt the face as needed.

You are done! Of course now you can crop the photo, change the background color, etc, but that is the basics.

This gives you an overview of the tools and concepts used for PSE for any costume.  I hope it helps out 🙂