How to Replace a Mouth With Stitches in Photoshop

Stitch up a portrait's mouth with digital sutures for a zombie look.

Popular culture features many zombied images of human faces with mouths closed up and replaced with sutures. Most Adobe Photoshop artists prefer to fabricate the zombie look digitally rather than expect a real zombie to pose for photographs. Today's Photoshop tools can make quick work of the gruesome task of transforming faces into subhumanity. You will find it more difficult to avoid scaring yourself with the images you create than to create these scary looks themselves.

Instructions

Remove Mouth

1. Choose "Layers" from the Window menu to open the Layers panel if it isn't already visible. Click on the "Background" layer's listing in the Layers panel to select it, then choose "Duplicate Layer" from the fly-out menu at the top right corner of the panel. Name your duplicate "Liquify."

2. Choose "Liquify" from the Filter menu. When the Liquify dialog box opens on your screen, select the Forward Warp tool at the top of the tool set located at the right side of the interface. Set your brush size to a diameter approximately twice the height of your subject's lower lip. Set brush density to 50 and brush pressure to 100.

3. Press down on the subject's upper lip in short, gentle strokes to compress the lip to a thin, straight line. Press up on the subject's lower lip to transform it as well. If your subject's mouth is open, work slowly in small increments to close the mouth as you compress the lips. Click on the "OK" button to accept your transformations when you finish them.

4. Choose "New Layer" from the fly-out menu at the top-right corner of the Layers panel. Name your new layer "Retouch."

5. Select the Healing Brush tool from the Adobe Photoshop toolbox. Choose a brush size roughly equal to the starting height of your subject's tallest lip. Right-click to bring up brush options and set brush hardness to 85 percent.

6. Choose a cloning source in the subject's forehead, chin or cheek. Select a location that gives you at least enough unobstructed skin to cover the remainder of the subject's mouth. Make sure "Sample All Layers" is active in the options bar so you can clone from the "Liquify" layer to your new "Retouch" layer.

7. Hold down the "Alt" key (Windows) or "Option" key (Mac) and click on your cloning source. Paint with the Healing Brush tool across the remainder of the subject's mouth in a line that follows the lips. Repeat the retouching process if your first pass doesn't eradicate all the remaining traces of the lips.

8. Look for remaining artifacts of the Liquify process. Gently remove them with the Healing Brush.

Create Sutures

1. Select the Pen tool from the Adobe Photoshop toolbox. Choose "Paths" from the Window menu to open the Paths panel if it isn't already visible. Select "New Path" from the fly-out menu at the top-right corner of the panel and name your new path "Sutures."

2. Place your cursor just inside where the left corner of the mouth appeared. Click above where the subject's mouth used to be, then click again below it to draw the basis for the first suture.

3. Click on the Pen tool in the toolbox to deselect the first path segment you drew. Move to the right of the first segment and draw another. Continue drawing path segments that are roughly equal in height until you've created five to ten of them. You can turn off the visibility of your "Liquify" layer so you can view the subject's unaltered face for reference, then turn the "Liquify" layer's visibility back on when you finish drawing your paths.

4. Select the Brush tool from the Adobe Photoshop toolbox. Set brush hardness to 60 percent and choose a small brush diameter. For example, if you're working in a high-resolution document at 300 pixels per inch and your subject's face is 300 to 400 pixels wide, use a 4-pixel brush diameter to create your sutures. Double-click on the foreground color swatch in the toolbox to bring up the Photoshop Color Picker. Set your brush color to black or dark brown and click on the "OK" button.

5. Create a new Photoshop document layer. Name it "Sutures" and set its blending mode to Linear Burn.

6. Switch back to the Paths panel. Hold down the "Alt" key (Windows) or "Option" key (Mac), and click on the icon for your "Sutures" path layer to select all the line segments you drew.

7. Choose "Stroke Path" from the fly-out menu of the Paths panel. Select the Brush tool from the drop-down menu in the "Stroke Path" dialog box. Adobe Photoshop applies a stroke weight equal to the brush diameter you choose, laying down color on your "Sutures" layer following your path segments.

8. Switch back to the Layers panel. Create a new document layer and name it "Suture Holes." Choose the Clone Stamp tool from the Adobe Photoshop toolbox. Set your brush diameter to the same size you used to stroke your suture paths. Hold down the "Alt" key (Windows) or "Option" key (Mac), and click on an area of unaltered flesh tone to select your cloning source. If necessary, temporarily turn off the visibility of your "Sutures" layer so you don't accidentally include any of its textures in your cloning step.

9. Paint a small dot at each end of each suture, creating a spot slightly larger than the diameter of the suture line. Use the drop-down menu at the top of the Layers panel to set the blending mode of the "Suture Holes" layer to Multiply.

10. Click on the "Add a Layer Style" icon at the bottom of the Layers panel and choose "Bevel and Emboss." Set your emboss style to "Emboss," technique to "Smooth," depth to 50 percent, direction to "Down" and size to the same diameter as the brush with which you stroked the suture paths. Set soften to 0 pixels. In the "Shading" section of the "Bevel and Emboss" effect dialog, set the angle to 120 degrees, the altitude to 30, the gloss contour to "Cove -- Deep," the highlight mode to "Screen" at 30 percent opacity and the shadow mode to "Multiply" at 100 percent opacity. Use the default white highlight and black shadow. Click on the "OK" button when you complete your settings.

11. Select the "Sutures" layer in the Layers panel and add an "Outer Glow" effect to its layer style. Set the blend mode to "Multiply," the opacity to 75 percent, noise to 0 percent and the solid color to a deep red. In the "Elements" section of the effect dialog, set technique to "Precise," spread to 2 percent and size to 1 or 2 pixels. Skip the "Quality" section of the dialog box. Click on the "OK" button to complete your effect.

Finishing Touches

1. Add a touch of irregularity to your suture lines. Select the "Sutures" layer in the Layers panel. Choose the "Distort" fly-out menu of the Filter menu, then select the "Ripple" filter.

2. Set ripple size to "Medium." Set the ripple percentage to a small positive or negative value, starting at 10 or -10 and altering the value based on what you see in the effect preview.

3. Click on the "OK" button to accept your transformation when the effect amount makes the sutures look slightly wrinkled, as if they have been in place for long enough to become distorted by healing skin. Save your document.

Tips & Warnings

• Experiment with smaller or larger brush sizes and effect settings depending on the size and resolution of your image.

• Paint on touches of dried or fresh blood at the edges of your suture holes to heighten the gruesomeness of your image.

• Leave the thinned line of the subject's lips visible, instead of retouching it off, to create a different version of this image treatment.

• Use an adjustment layer to change the subject's skin tone to a creepier color.

• Especially when you create bizarre, unflattering image transformations, work on a duplicate of your original portrait layer in a copy of your master file.

References

• Adobe Systems: Using Adobe Photoshop CS5

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish
• "The Photoshop CS3/CS4 WOW! Book"; Linnea Dayton, et al.; 2010
• "The Photoshop CS/CS2 WOW! Book"; Linnea Dayton, et al.; 2007