Merging Faces in Photoshop

I've now come to the editing stage of this assignment. This is the most significant part of this entire process as I'll be able to develop my idea visually for all to see.
The method I went by is less complex than it actually looks. As I mentioned previously I instructed each person show no emotion, keeping their expression simple and plain. This made it much more  easier for me to manipulate the face as I didn't have to compensate for any unwanted assets such as dimples or laughter lines.  


The first important step was to pick a portrait at random to act as the base layer. Once I decided on this it was a matter of looking through the rest of images and pinpointing certain features that I wanted to meld on the original the portrait. From square one I had already decided that I didn't want to make any drastic changes to the face structure (i.e changing the face shape), because I wanted to obviously keep the appearance to remain as life like as possible, so instead I only tampered with subtle details such as the eyes, nose, mouth and on certain occasion skin colour and  facial hair. Choosing the different features was not a hard task, I simply analysed every face I had photographed and incorporated the asset I found most striking about each one. 


The first changes I made were to the eyes. Again I didn't make any alterations to the actual eye shape but just replaced the colour of the iris. In order to create a slight different I chose a someone who's eyes were significantly darker to the model of my base layer. 
This was a very straightforward clone tool operation. First of all I already had the first portrait as my base open. Then once I decided on the eyes I was going to use I opened the another image. Flicking back to the original portrait, I create a new layer, appropriately re-naming it eyes. I then return back to the second portrait, zooming in on the person's iris and with the clone tool pressed the alt key which marked the point of where the tool was copying from. Switching back to the original once again, I then once again zoomed in around the eyes and with the clone tool, softly blended in the new eye colour. Whilst doing this I had to pay particular attention to anything that might of been merged in that made the eye look slightly abnormal, like a drooping  eyelash or the tiniest spec of mascara. Fortunately the eraser brush was at hand if any of those problems did occur and by lowering the opacity to about 50%, I was able to maintain a natural appearance to the transformation. 


I then basically followed the exact same routine when it came to altering the nose and lips, making separate layers for each counterpart so that it was easier to correct the appearance if errors emerged and lowering the opacity so that the landscape of the face remained as human and authentic as it possibly could.  




- Print Screen - Step by Step to come of nose and mouth-