One of the most popular creatures lately are vampires. The explosion of TV shows and movies like True Blood, Twilight and Underworld have taken the vampire image a long way from the original Dracula. In this Photoshop tutorial, you will learn how to transform the semmingly innocent young woman into her alter-ego, a vampire! Colin shows you how to quickly and easily create a very realistic looking vampire from a photo. Do try this at home!
Thanks for checking out this tutorial, the edited written steps are coming soon!
How to Turn a Person into a Vampire in Photoshop Tutorial
Hey Cafe Crew, it’s Colin Smith here and this week, I’m going to show you how to transform this woman into a vampire.
So welcome to this week’s tutorial. I’m just going to jump right in and start transforming this woman into a vampire. So the first thing we want to do is we want to kind of cut out and isolate her skin, so let’s start with that. We’re just going to grab the Quick Select Tool here and I’ll just go over and start isolating it.
Now, usually, what happens is you’re going to over-select and then just come back and clean it up using the Alt or the Option key. It seems to work well for me. Now just to let you know, I’m using a pressure-sensitive Wacom tablet, so as I’m pressing lighter, it’s doing a more fine selection. As I’m pressing harder, it’s doing a more stronger selection. So I’m just hitting the Option key right now and I’m just painting back in the areas I want. My hand is off the Option now and I’m just selecting around the skin here, so let’s grab this here. So we’re hitting the Option key once again and we’re just going in there. I’m selecting it.
Now this part can be a little bit tedious. I’m not going to take a ton of time to do this, but we can get pretty close. All right, that’s not bad. That’s looking pretty good. All right, so what we’re going to do now is we’re going to click on Select and Mask. So under the Select and Mask, we can actually really refine this. And what I’m going to do is I’m actually going to use the Feather. Now it’s not something I do a lot. To be honest with you, I don’t very often feather my selections, but in this case, I think it’s going to work quite well. And then, we’re just going to go down and make sure we got a new layer with Layer Mask right there, which is going to pop it open.
Okay, so there we go, we’ve got that selection. That’s her skin and underneath, there’s everything else. So I’m going to actually select this layer underneath. I want to darken it here and give her a kind of like a deeper red kind of a hair. So we’re going to go into Curves. Now, to hit Curves, we’re just going to open up the Curves here and let me just pop the curves out into the middle; there we go. And then, we’re going to go into the three quarter shadow region and we’re going to pull this down, and we’re just darkening it down a little bit. See how that gives you a darker hair, and we’re just going to pop up this bit, and they just kind of boost the red a little bit, and let me just get it down a bit more. There we go. And we’re even going to go into the reds and let’s give it a little boost in the reds. There we go, give her some redder hair.
And let me just go back to RGB again and just playing around, trying to get the right feel. Okay, that looks pretty good. I’m happy with that. So if we’ll look at this, it’s the hair before and after. It just frames the face a little bit stronger. And, also, notice that because I popped the skin onto the layer above, this is what it would look like if we were adjusting it all together, but in this case, we didn’t. I just want to darken that hair. All right, so let’s go in and what we’re going to do is we’re going to go in and grab a Hue and Saturation, and all I’m going to do is take the saturation and pull it down because what I want to do is I want to take the color out of the skin.
Now I don’t want to go all the way to black and white. I want to go to about there so we got a little color, but not a ton of it. Now notice it’s affecting everything including her hair, so if you see this little clipping button here, that’s in the Properties panel, and you click on there and what it does is it clips it to that layer. Now, you can do the same thing with the Alt or the Option key, so when you’ve got an adjustment layer, hit the Alt or the Option and then, click there, and it will clip it directly to the layer underneath. All right, so that’s great. So we’ve got that kind of vampirish-looking kind of skin and color and stuff there; that’s good. That’s a good start.
Now, it’s not menacing at all. We’ve got some other things we need to do here because what I want to do now is I want to make this face a little bit more interesting, a little bit more sinister, so we’re going to go and we’re going to select on the face here and, now, we’re going to go under Liquify, so we’re going to choose Filter, Liquify, and let’s play around with this a little bit. So one of the things I want to do is maybe drop the eye height down a little bit, so she kind of looks like she’s squinting a little bit more, so let’s adjust a little bit more menacing that way, and let’s make those eyes a little wider, make them slightly smaller. We don’t want them too big. And then, what we’re going to do is take the tilt, and then, we’re going to tilt this down to kind of make it just a little bit more sinister. And the eye direction, let’s keep them nice and far apart, and maybe we take the height down a little bit more. All right, that’s looking pretty good so far. Okay, so let’s have a look at the mouth here. We want to make this mouth a little bit more menacing as well. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to take this smile and we’re going to pull it down a little bit into a slightly bit of a frown.
And let’s make that mouth a little bit wider because, you know, with vampires, that’s where the fangs are, so we really want to bring attention to that. It’s looking pretty good. All right, so let’s have a look. Let’s narrow the nose down a little bit and let’s come down a little bit more here. Let’s bring the forehead down just a touch. And what I want to do, too, is I want to make the jawline, so that we can make that narrow. I can make it a little bit thinner because she’s a vampire she’s not well-nourished, eating a lot of vegetables and stuff, and I’m also going to narrow the face down. It just makes that look a little bit more sinister. All right, so that’s looking good. So we’re just going to click okay to apply that and notice now. So, if we look at that before and after, you can see, she’s definitely got more of a sinister look going on.
All right, so what we’re going to do now is some coloring. I want to bring back some red into those lips. So remember this Hue and Saturation took away the color, so let’s click on the layer mask, which is the white area. I’m going to grab the brush, make sure I’m grabbing black as the foreground, Opacity all the way to 100, and I want to make a pretty hard edged brush. I’m not going to go all the way hard; maybe to about 94 is pretty good. And all I’m going to do now is I’m just going to hit the right bracket key to make it bigger and I’m just going to paint on that layer and let some of that color come back there. So this is what I’m doing here, just letting that color in for those lips. Yeah, that’s looking pretty good.
Now I could make those lips a little bit redder if I want to and why don’t I do that? So what I’m going to do is I’m just going to Ctrl Click to make a selection. Notice what I did is I Ctrl Click on that mask there and I selected that area, but I want to Inverse it because notice everything is selected, so I’m going to go under Select and use the Command Shift I, then let’s go down to Select InverseóCommand Shift I or Ctrl Shift I. Now we just got the lips area. So let’s go to the layer underneath, so we’re looking underneath there. That’s our layer where, now, we’re working on the original image, and I’m going to hit Ctrl U for Hue/Saturation. And then, what I’m going to do is I’m going to give it a little boost of saturation there, take the lightness there, and I actually will just leave that lightness; it’s not looking good. Let’s play around a little bit with the lips, maybe go that way slightly, so I’m just trying to make them look a little bit redder. I don’t want to go all the way there because that looks so fake; just give it a little boost. Click OK, Ctrl D, and there we go. That’s definitely looking a little bit better.
All right, so the next thing we want to do is we want to work on these eyes. We want to make these eyes look more vampirish, so I’m going to make a selection around here using the Elliptical Marquee Tool and I’m holding the Shift key to constrain that to a circle and I’m using the Space bar to move it around. All right, I’ve selected that one eye. Now, I’m going to hold the Shift key and that will add to the selection and I’m going to pull out another circle, and I’m also going to hit the Space bar to reposition that. And I’m just sizing it, so I’m just tapping on that Space bar to move it, releasing the Spacebar to size it. All right, those are those two eyes. That’s great.
Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to go back to my Hue/Saturation Adjustment Layer there and I’m just going to fill this with black, so that should be Alt Backspace or Option Delete, and then, what that’s doing here is it’s just allowing me to get the color in just in that area there, so by turning that mask off, I’m showing the color underneath. Now I’m going to go in and I’m going to add some curves here, and I’m going to give this some color. So let’s go into the Adjustment Layer with that still selected and we’re going to go up here and we’re going to grab the Curves Adjustment Layer. So, now, just the eyes are going to be adjusted because those are the ones that are selected.
So let’s just pull down a little bit, just darken them down a little bit. That’s already looking a lot better, but we got to play around with some color. We want some real kind of vampire color going on here. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to grab the blue and I’m going to reduce the blue a little bit. Yeah, that’s starting to get somewhere, and I’m going to give the red a bit of a boost there. And that’s getting pretty close to what you see sometimes for the vampire-colored eyes. Sometimes you see they’re more red and if that was the case, if I wanted to go more red, I just wouldn’t pull that blue down, and I would pull the red up a little bit more. And sometimes I go a little yellow, but it’s, you know, I think about there is looking pretty good for the color. I like that.
All right, so we’ve got a few more things to do here. We’re almost there as far as, you know the coloring and stuff like that, but the big thing is really going to give us this vampire feel now is the make-up. So what we’re going to do is darken around these eyes. So I’m going to create a new layer and I’m just going to change this to Overlay. And now I’m going to grab a brush, make sure we got black selected as a foreground color and I’m going to make this a soft-edged brush, and I’m going to pull the Opacity down to 50% by hitting the 5 key on the keyboard or you can just scroll down there. And if you’re using a mouse, I’d take that down to around maybe 10 to 20% and slowly build this up. I’m going to hit 50% because I’m using a pressure-sensitive tablet, so let me just away from there, hit the 5 key once again, and let’s open up the Brushes panel.
The Brushes panel is right there. So I want to make sure Shape Dynamics is turned off. Transfer, I want to make sure that that is set there to Pen pressure, so that means that I can paint using pen pressure, you know, like you would with a pencil. And I’m going to grab a bigger kind of a brush here and I’m just, very gently, and you might do this at like, maybe, 10% if you’re using a mouse. I’m just going around just to darken around the eyes just a little bit, just creating an overall mood. I’m not going heavy or anything yet, just creating a mood. And notice I’m just slowly building this up. I’m not trying to rush. I’m not trying to apply this right away in one go. And that really is the key to this kind of thing. It’s just take your time and just gently add it on.
All right, so now I’m going to go down to a smaller brush and I’m just going to start to play a little darker under the eyes there and a little darker over the eyes. And if you looked at a lot of the vampire make-up that they used, you’ll notice that very, very dark around the eyes. It kind of adds to that kind of sinister look, so just kind of darkening around there. Good, okay, let’s go to a slightly bigger brush again and I’m just kind of blending this in. And notice I’m going a little further outside of that area now, just gently blending this in, and you get the general idea here. So what I’m doing is I’m just adding that make-up around there.
Now what I’m going to do is I’m going to come in here, something you probably wouldn’t do too much on real make-up, and just darken right in here, but this is what we’d do for vampire make-up. All right, that’s starting to look a lot better. All right, what I’m going to do now is I’m going to add just a little bit of red in there. So let’s go in there, we’re going to grab some redósome darker redóand I’m just going to drop this Opacity down to maybe 20%. I just tapped the “2” key to do that. I’m just going to give this just blending in just a slight touch of red on the top and the bottom. There we go. And that starts to give it more of that kind of vampirish feel. There we go. All right, so we didn’t get too carried away with the red. We just very, very gently put that in and we can see that we’re getting much, much closer. All right, what I’m going to do now is I want to really give this a bit of a boost here by adding some Curves into here, so I’m just going to grab the Curves again.
So, we’re just going to grab the Curves Adjustment Layer on the very top, and then, we’re just going to pull down a little bit on the shadows to kind of give it some definition; there we go, look at that. And then, we’re going to go in the Highlights and maybe just pop it up just a little bit. So, we’re increasing the Contrast, making this a very, very kind of contrasty image. And that’s looking good. And let me just check something. Yeah, I’m thinking, right in there, I’m going to hit the black brush here, and one of the things I’m going to experiment with really quickly is I want to see if I can just paint away the eyes. Let’s zoom in a little bit on these eyes. Grab a small brush and I’m just going to go around this edge to make those eyes a little bit lighter in those areas right there, just around the irises; not in the pupil, but just around the iris. Let’s have a look at our before. Here we go, we got the nice, sweet, innocent girl and, now, we got this vampire.
So I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please hit the Subscribe button, become part of the Cafe crew. I’ve got new tutorials that I’m doing every single week. If you’re really serious about Photoshop and Lightroom and different gadgets and things like that, become part of the Cafe crew by hitting that Subscribe button. So, anyway, thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. Add a comment, you know, hit the Like button if you like this. Let me know what kind of tutorials you’d like, and until next time, I’ll see you at the CAFE.
Check out all our other new tutorials here at PhotoshopCAFE!
Good to see you here a the CAFE
Colin
PS Don’t forget to follow us on Social Media for more tips.. (I’ve been posting some fun Instagram and Facebook Stories lately)
You can get my free Layer Blending modes ebook along with dozens of exclusive Photoshop Goodies here 
