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Avatar Photoshop Tutorial

This Photoshop tutorial teaches how to transform a human photograph into a Na'vi from the Avatar movie using various Photoshop tools and techniques. The 11 step tutorial guides the user to modify features like the nose, eyes, skin color, and adds elements like stripes, glowing dots and ears to make the subject look like one of the blue-skinned Na'vi inhabitants of Pandora. With the tools of Photoshop like liquify, levels, hue/saturation and layer styles, the tutorial shows how to easily create a Na'vi avatar from a regular human photo.

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Ethelrida Puno
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84 views

Avatar Photoshop Tutorial

This Photoshop tutorial teaches how to transform a human photograph into a Na'vi from the Avatar movie using various Photoshop tools and techniques. The 11 step tutorial guides the user to modify features like the nose, eyes, skin color, and adds elements like stripes, glowing dots and ears to make the subject look like one of the blue-skinned Na'vi inhabitants of Pandora. With the tools of Photoshop like liquify, levels, hue/saturation and layer styles, the tutorial shows how to easily create a Na'vi avatar from a regular human photo.

Uploaded by

Ethelrida Puno
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Avatar Photoshop Tutorial

Avatar's main character Jake Sully, paraplegic war veteran, is brought to another planet
called Pandora. Pandora is inhabited by a primitive race called the Na'vi, and Jake is
sent in to learn their ways so that he can help relocate them in order for humans to take
over their resources.

3D computer graphic adventure Avatar is the most expensive film in history, it took $500
million and 10 years to make. The James Cameron film, uses pioneering 3-D
technology and computer graphics.

With this tutorial you can easily transform yourself into a Na'vi. I used Photoshop CS3 to
transform my boyfriend to Jake. I hope you will like this Avatar movie tutorial.
Step 1 - Creating Na'vi's nose
Import a photograph of your choice, just make sure that size is relatively large. Also,
make sure that the person on the photograph is well lit (but not over lit) perhaps taken
with flash, so that enough sharp details are visible.

First you need to duplicate background layer.

This is one of the most important steps. To do this, we will use Liquify filter. Go to Filter
> Liquify > Forward Warp Tool. First, pull from the middle of the nose to the left, then to
the right side, as shown in the picture below.

After you fix the nose you have to raise the eyebrows. If you are not precise, and if your
hand is not trained, it's suggested that you set the brush pressure to 50. But I used
Brush Size 205, Brush Density 50 and Brush Pressure 100. If you make a mistake you
can use Reconstruct Tool.
Step 2
After first step, duplicate layer. Use Burn Tool and darken the nose from both sides.
Step 3 – Cleaning eyebrows and enlarging eyes
Use Clone Stamp Tool to remove the excess of the eyebrows. When you are done with
that you can make eyes bigger with Bloat Tool. Go to Filter > Liquify and choose Bloat
Tool.
Step 4 – Na'vi's Skin color
In this step, we will transform human skin into Navi's. So, for this, we will use
Hue/Saturation. Select the following parameters:
Step 5 - Staining of the lips and the nose
Set the opacity of the Brush to 50% and choose #fa7d7d for color and paint the mouth
and top of the nose. After all this you have to switch Layer Mode to Hue.
Step 6 – Levels
To darken or lighten a picture (in my case darken) you have to use Levels. Go to Image
> Adjustments > Levels and set the best effect for your picture.
Step 7 – Na'vi's Eyes
Na'vi's iris is considerably larger than human one in relation to the size of the whole eye.
For the Na'vi's eyes I copied left eye from the Avatar poster picture. The copied eye was
smaller so in that case you have to press CTRL+T (transformations) and expand the
eye. If something does not fit in place try different types of transformations, for example,
Skew. When you finish with one eye just copy it, flip horizontally (Edit >Transform >Flip
Horizontally) and move to the other side and again set to match the size of the original
eye. Than use Dodge and Burn Tool to have more realistic look. In the end, you have to
lower layer opacity to 71% and fill to 89%.
Step 8
For nicer look you can make a new layer and merge all previous layers by pressing
CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E and than change Layer Mode to Soft Light.

Step 9 – Ears
Copy the ears from poster image and paste them on your picture. If it's necessary,
increase the ears and rotate them to fit natural. When you finish with Na'vi's ears, make
new layer and merge all visible layers (CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+E). In new layer delete
human ears from the photo, like on the picture below.
Step 10 – Na`vi's Skin
You may remember from movie, Na'vi have some dark lines on their skin. In this step,
we will create those lines, using pattern. You can simply go right click on the picture
below and save it on your computer.
After that open this zebra pattern in Photoshop and, while holding Ctrl, just drag and
drop to your avatar photo. If you need bigger pattern you can expand it. Then, use
Eraser Tool to delete unnecessary pattern from background, eyes and lips, till you have
something like this:
The next thing you have to do is to set Layer Mode to Overlay and lower the Opacity to
19% (in my case).
Step 11 – Sparkling dots
The next thing we're going to do is creation of glowing dots on the skin.

First you have to set brush like on picture below and than click on Pen Tool, change to
Paths and draw. Then, switch from Layers to Paths, right click on Work Path and
choose Stroke Path. On drop down list select Brush and check Simulate Pressure.
Go to Layer > Layer Style> Blending Options > Outer Glow and set it like this:

Result
The last thing remaining is to make new layer, merge all previous layers and set
Blending Mode for layer to Overlay and Opacity to 26%.
Finally, we are done with our Avatar movie character. As you can see transforming an
image into a Na'vi is not a very difficult task. So, get started and create your own Na'vi
images.

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