Photoshop CS3 Photo Effects Cookbook

Recipe 7.6. Adding Tattoos

If you've always hankered after a really good tattoo, but the thought of all of that pain has put you off, Photoshop CS3 has the solution. Here, we're going to look at how to apply a convincing tattoo to an image.

We've supplied the initial tattoo design, but you could just as easily create one for yourself by using the Pen tool and filling a path with color. What's most impressive about this technique is the new Clone Source capability of CS3, where we can clone an image from one file to another. You might not think that's so impressive, but you'll soon see that, thanks to Clone Source, you can not only clone, but you can also scale and rotate the source image to your heart's content before any actual cloning takes place. Now that's cloning at its best!

Of course, for a tattoo to look convincing, it needs to conform to the body it's applied to. To do that we'll be using the Warp command and Liquify filter. Follow the recipe and discover how to get tattooed, without the pain!

1 Open tattoo_design.jpg. Choose the Magic Wand tool from the Toolbar, set the Tolerance to 10, and check both Anti-Alias and Contiguous. Click on the Add To Selection icon, then click in the white area of the image with the wand to select it. Shift-click the white diamond shape ...