The Book of GIMP

5.1 Tutorial: Building a Composite Portrait

A composite portrait is an image that combines several different portraits to build a new portrait. For example, you could merge several artists’ renderings of eyewitness accounts to create the most accurate possible likeness of a dangerous criminal. You could also use these techniques to guess what the child of two people would look like or to invent a strange hybrid animal.

In this example, we create a composite of several young women who kindly agreed to let us use their pictures for this demonstration.

Each portrait was taken in front of the same neutral background, with the same lighting, and with the girls in approximately the same position. But differences in skin hue or in the tilt of their head ...