In this article I'm really excited to describe one of the best programs I've ever used; a free software that does many things, does them well and is within everyone's reach, young people, children, teens, gentlemen, expert users and people who can barely press the buttons on the mouse. When we talk about photo editing on a professional level we always think of programs such as Photoshop or its open source and free alter ego Gimp.
When, in many articles, we talked about photomontages, we were referring, in large part, to web applications that provide already preconfigured backgrounds in which to paste one's own photograph.
Finally on this occasion we can instead talk about photomontages in the true sense of the word, that is, in mixing two photographs, and put, for example, instead of the face of one, one's own .
Finally you can perform all personal photo editing operations where the background can be any digital image that is on the computer or on the internet.
You can thus make caricatures, improve images, remove defects, apply virtual makeup, make photomontages of ghosts or insert your own photo in backgrounds deriving from other images, creating frames, collages or magazine effects.
You can create video morphing with a real face swap, mixing two faces and you can create animations of a photo (like winking), create a gif and moving images.
For all this and much more you can use two programs suitable for everyone from the same developers, two free and free software .
1) Fotomix photo manipulator is a Photoshop made simple and affordable for everyone but above all it allows you to work on photos while having fun .
I do not say that it takes 5 minutes to do photo editing, editing and photomontages because it takes precision with the mouse and it cannot be done in a hurry but I can assure you that, on the technical level of the software, there is nothing to understand nor to to study.
I believe that, after using it, when you show a work completed with Fotomix, other people will find it hard to believe that you have not used a professional program such as Photoshop or worse.
It all comes down to using the mouse to move the "brush" or the brush with which you can move the elements, define and refine the contours and apply the nuances necessary to make the photo retouch or photomontage appear as real as possible.
The program interface responds very quickly to commands, consumes little PC memory and never loads more than necessary.
On the left the working tools (very few compared to other similar programs) and at the top the various phases of which the photo editing or modification is made.
To start, you can press the "Start a new project" button, stay on the first tab relating to the background of the photo, the background, then press "Import" and upload a photo from your computer or the internet.
You can cut out a piece of this photo or resize it, apply color effects to the whole photo or just a piece with the brush.
The nice thing is that for each effect, you can decide the intensity.
To have fun, if you immediately uploaded a photo of a face, you can press the "deform" button and pull the corners to deform the face as a famous iPhone application does.
Note that, from deformation it is possible to restore, so, if you overdo it, you can refine the result.
Alternatively, a two-color or a single-color texture can be chosen in the background.
The second step is to insert another photo above this by clicking on the "Foreground" item at the top.
On this occasion you can choose whether to crop the photo, turn it over, take only a part of it and whether, immediately start removing its possible background, so that it can then be adapted to the background photo chosen first.
But it is not necessary to do it immediately, you can do the finishing touches even at the end.
The third step is to compose the two photos, then one puts on the other .
Now, if you were on a program like Powerpoint or on a normal photo editor, there would be no great possibility of matching the superimposed photo on the chosen background.
Using Potoshop or similar, you can do everything but you have to work with the levels and move many settings so, without the tutorials and guides, it is not easy for anyone to extricate themselves.
Here instead, with Fotomix, the finishing work to create the photomontage can be done using a banal brush .
In fact, when the photo is superimposed on another, you can click on FadeBrush, choose a brush size (first bigger then gradually refining itself, smaller and smaller), zoom in on the photo to see the pixels well and apply an effect transparency to the part that does not interest the superimposed photo.
For example, if you put a face on top of another person, you can simply do it this way.
To refine the result you can then apply gradual transparency to the whole photo or the "edge fade" with Anti alias.
It doesn't matter that you don't know what these terms mean, the important thing is to see what happens when those levers move.
At the end, at the last stage, the final touches are made then, for example, go to " Color Brush ", choose the size of the brush and the intensity of the effect, press the small button " Pick color ", you take the color from the background of the photo and apply it on the outline to remove any whites or colors that do not center anything.
In the end, I can assure you that the result will be amazing, that you will have fun for half an hour and that you will have the feeling of having become real and professional graphic designers.
This was, roughly, the summary of the first tutorial where a single color is used as a background and not another photo.
On Fotomix, in the help menu where everything is explained in English but in a very concise way, there are 2 other tutorials:
- one to apply improvements to a face, eliminating wrinkles, pimples, imperfections with perfect makeup, smooth skin and a retouching from a model magazine.
- The other to merge two faces together and give birth to a third person who does not exist with the so-called animated Face Swap .
2) In another article instead we talk about FotoMorph Photo Animator that allows you to create moving images, mixing two photos or animating one .
These two programs are truly amazing and recommended, especially Fotomix is the best free program to create true and complete photo montages and edit images with professional photo editing .
Their simplicity will anger graphic designers and designers who have made the deck to study complicated programs (certainly even more powerful, of course .. don't kill me).
I, who am not a graphic designer, finally got the satisfaction of entering the famous toast which I thought I would never have been able to do. In this case believe me, I worked quickly and I made the contours a bit wrong, with another 10 minutes you could do much better, even that done (note the white outline of the woman in the center) by professional graphic designers.
As I always say, a computer must make life easy for humans and programs, if they are too complicated, are not good software.
