Halloween Photoshop Tutorial: Creating Zombie
Right, now we need to add the skull to the image and fit it to our face. The image of the skull I use in this tutorial was a skull I borrowed from the Oral Surgery department at the hospital where I work. Anyway, I opened the image in Photoshop, cropped the skull to size, then copied it into my base document.
I reduced the opacity of the skull to 50%, then hit CTRL+T to enter into transform mode. Move and resize the skull to fit your face. The best way to line this up so it is more realistic is to pay attention to key feature. The most important being the upper ridge of the eye-socket lines up with the same ridge on your face, the jawbone needs to roughly line up as well, and also make sure the teeth and nose are in roughly the right place. This may mean you need to distort the skull image quite a lot from how it originally looked, but since we wont be seeing too much of the skull it doesn’t matter if the rest of it isn’t perfect.. basically the ridges of the eyes/eyebrows, the teeth and the nose are the most important here. See below for example.
Once you are happy with the skull placement, hit enter and then set the opacity of the layer back upto 100%. Add a layer mask to the skull layer and mask out the edges around the skull. I also had to mask around the fingers as they would, in real-life(?) be obstructing the face/skull. This is what I have so far, hopefully yours will be looking something like this now.
OK, next we need to go back to our base layer, that is the composite of the first two layers, and duplicate it and drag it to the top of the layer stack. Create a layer mask on that layer and get ready to scrape away some of your skin!!
Selecting the newest layer mask, select the brush tool, medium hardness, and select black from the colour palette (remember you can switch between Black and White by pressing the “X” key). Now, when you start to paint on the face, you will see the skull layer beginning to appear, freaky huh? I find its best to completely paint out the nose and one of the eyes and of course the teeth! Another great tip to remember is to use the square brackets “[ & ]” to alter your brush size on-the-fly.
Take you time on this stage and have fun, pay particular attention to the area around the teeth and try to make the skin/teeth blend in nicely together. Hopefully your image will look something similar to this now.
Even at this stage the picture looks super gruesome already, but what kind of self-respecting zombie doesn’t have a bit of flesh-rot to really stink up the place!! This is where things get very nasty indeed.
STAGE 3 - Rips and Scars and Veins, oh my!!
OK, next you need to create another layer, name this one VEINS.
OK, here you need to load up the “Pretty Cracks & Sores” brush set we downloaded earlier. These are pretty big brushes, however we really need them to cover the whole face (we will mask out the surplus veins in a minute). Select a brush you like the look of, choose a nice dark, deep red from the colour picker (and RGB value of 74,0,0 works well) and stamp it over your face (on the new layer). Don’t worry if it looks a bit strange at the moment. Add a layer mask to this layer and use the black brush tool to delete the veins’n’stuff from areas that don’t need them (eyes, bits of skull, fingers, teeth etc). Set the layer mode to `Multiply”. Again, spend a bit of time on this to make it look badass. Once finished, right click on the layer. Select “Blending Options” and put a tick in the “Bevel & Emboss” check box, here I used the defaults but adjusted the depth a tiny bit to increase the bumpiness of the veins.
Now, you can add more layers and use more of the brushes we download earlier to add more scarring, tearing and veinage, experiment and have fun, it really is great defacing yourself or a loved one!! Remember to use separate layers for the hands, body etc.
So next is just a few more overall cosmetic changes to the image to make it darker & grittier. Basically I just add a gradient map layer (black to white), contrast/brightness layer and adjust to taste!! Now, hopefully you should be zombified up to the max. George Romero would be proud of you! R.I.P.
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Creating Zombie Tutorial by Mark Simms [ e-mail | Flickr | DPChalange ]
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Great tutorial! Thank you for sharing this..
No probs, I wuld love to see other images people create using this tutorial.
http://tvlookplay.deviantart.com/art/Zombie-85818849
heres what i did X]
Mark, thank you for the tutorial. Is the `tonemapping plugin available for free? Where can I download it? Thank you.
Daniella, sadly its a payware plugin.. dont fret thoughy because it isnt essential to this tutorial.
Sweet Effects. This tutorial is really well explained. keep it up. good show.
this is cool.. Gotta to try it soon!
That’s great technique! The only thing I would change is that skull. Atm it looks too clean, maybe another color filter would do the trick
Very nice tut
I learned alot!
Here’s my result:
http://img413.imageshack.us/img413/1845/pwnagephotoshopnessgr8.png
I changed the skull layer to Hard Light cause it didn’t blend in very well with the face, and it turned out to be a really good idea
Btw: that guy isn’t me
just ftr
It’s my first Photoshop Zombie ever and my god am i proud of it ^.^ Thanks for the tut
good job on the tutorial. fox: nice work man.
Thanks for all the comments guys.. I am putting another together for a similar yet altogether cooler effect, I will contact Paul to see if he is interested in posting it on this blog..
Great image FOX!! Very disturbing, which is perfect!!
Mark.. Just shoot me an email when your next tutorial is ready..
Awesome tutorial! I’m surprised at how well mine came out, considering it was one of my first serious photoshop endeavors. Check it out and let me know what you think!
http://www.geocities.com/niconc2/finished.jpg
Great tutorial, one of my favourites.
I’ll definately check into finding more of yours.
I attached my pic to the comment, it’s okay, i’m 95% happy with it, I just wished the skull was a little darker.
http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/9523/zombie2lw7.jpg
(It didn’t attach last time i sent)
That is scarry!
how can i convert my image to 16/32 bit?? I’d tried everything, but i still can’t use the tonemapping function…
can somebody help me?
please reply if you can! thank you
To convert from 8bit to 16bit, in Photoshop goto Image->mode->16bit
thats it!!
Thank you! I was wondering about this too..
Zajebiste!!
the first time ever i did sth with photoshop! great tutorial!
hey just some criticism, but I think it would look better if you got rid of the cuts and blood and whatnot on the skull since its sort of impossible for a skull to bleed lol
hey as i said on your flickr profile, these are great, I love the tutorial ^__^
http://www.the-alien.co.uk/ozombie.png
http://www.the-alien.co.uk/rhi_zombie.png
those are my first two real attempts =) I did one or two others butthey went kind of crap *eyeroll* =P
once again, your pics are ace and thanks for the tut =)
Thanks for all the great comments and sharing your creations, some outstanding work there by everyone..
Still putting together my next tut, should be ready soon..
Woot ! man that’s f****n awesome !
Keep Up The Good Work.
I’ll add myself zombifief soon
Yep nice job blah blah, only criticism is the misnomer of being labled as a zombie instead of any other evil/dark creature you appear to be
watch more zombie movies with oozing blood
u need the ooze
Actually I must disagree, a zombie, by generally received definition, is a reanimated corpse, basically a dead person that has kind of been bought back to life. Thus the person would of been in the grave for a while and a certain amount of decomposition would of occured, the chances of ANY oozing blood would be highly unlikely since it would of coagulated only hours after the original death of the person.
So I am of the thinking that my image showing rotten skin, scabbed up blood and parts of the skull showing through is closer to how a zombie would look than ones seen in films.. ANy oozing blood seen on these creatures would more likely be blood from one of their freshly killed and eaten victims, and not their own blood.
Hope this clears up this matter.
hey i think it was a little hard to understand but thanks for the free brushes!!! they are really nice maybe you should make a video of you doing the steps so people like me who are novice can better follow.
Currently working on a video tut, once its done I will stick it up on youtube and ask the site admin here to post a link.
I’m so confused without the tonemapping thing I need help
I have the skull and my picture..
and I don’t get.. it.. how it says
CTRL+T ..
I tried that.. and it didn’t do anything O.o
I need help..
These intructions are very confusing, they need to zoom in the whole.. deal..
:/
Sorry
Not at all, hopefully you will revisit this site shortly when I post the video tutorial, hopefully that will make things a lot clearer.
However, CTRL-T activates the transform mode, make sure you have the skull layer selected. WHen you enter transform mode you will see a scalable box highlight the edge of the current layer. slecting any of the boxes on the edge will allow you to resize the skull to fit the shape of the face layer.
I should of mentioned that this tutorial is aimed at “above-beginner” level, it should be accessible to anyone comfortable working with layers & masks.
and here’s my result:
http://nasza-klasa.pl/photos/230725/11_real.jpeg
I went to your DeviantArt page to download the brushes and apparently everything downloaded okay. I saved the files on my computer, tried to open them and then Photoshop opened and I can`t find the brushes. I clicked on the brushes tab on the top next to the file browser and they aren`t there.
Is there anywhere else they would be or anything else I have to do to get them? I’m new to this and I couldn’t even get passed the tonemapping section in here. Help please?
awesome tutorial
i made one
it’s not as good as yours but yeah
my zombified self
hi guys, all of you did a very good job, (awesome) i want to do my own, can anyone link me some crack image, can;t find good crack image,.. thnkx guys,..
The links to the `crack` brushes are all in the tutorial.
the link to the pretty brushes works. then I go to the person’s page who made them. once there I clicked on the link for their site to download and the site doesn’t work.. Help?
I can switch to 16-bit mode and have the tonemapping plugin installed but I got no clue how to use it.
I looked through all the filters and it’s not listed there - any ideas?
Brilliant mate, thank you for a great tutorial. I was able to download a trial version of tonemapping but they put ugly text over your image. I thought I could outsmart them by working with a massive image, but they’ve accounted for that by placing the text in multiple places. Tricky bastards
Instead I played with hue, brightness and contrast and a bunch of burn to try and get the dirty look.
As the others have said before me, it’s not as good as yours but I had fun and want to thank you for the knowledge!
It is a photo of me and I am striking the same pose as you. There can be only a master and an apprentice…
http://www.mike250.com/images/textures/michael_skull.jpg
This is so good, I learned a lot.
Heres what I came up with: http://i19.tinypic.com/4lgq3ap.jpg
I made of my 8 year ols son a zombie. Great tutorial, and it was real fun to create this!
Greetings from Belgium
http://img205.imageshack.us/my.php?image=zombieaffichenieuwkm2.jpg
Nice work everyone. Thanks for all the nice comments and emails!
my firts extreme makeover ever
gr8 tutorial!!
http://img99.imageshack.us/img99/6206/ldin4.jpg
that’s what i got.
here is mine, im pretty happy with results
http://i22.tinypic.com/2u5sv15.jpg
great tut. thnx a lot.,
and here’s my result… again
http://photos4.nasza-klasa.pl/dev14/0/003/581/0003581527.jpg
for the beginners, it is hard to perform. You didn’t give any detail about how to open, how to draw, how to change.
I couldn’t understand the second page.
Sorry you found the tutorial difficult, all the feedback I have received so far has been very positive.
I am sorry to say, but if you are not comfortable with `opening` files in photoshop then maybe you should really go back to basics before attempting a tutorial such as this, especially one that deals with alpha channels and masking.
Can someone help me with the gradient map, its the last step, either its something really simple, or something I couldn’t find… Thanks.
how can i save my picture as a jpg?
Hi, not being funny, but if you are not sure how to save as a JPG in photoshop then this tutorial may be a bit above your skill level at the moment.
Hi all,
just to let you know I have put together a 4 minute video of how this was done, its not meant to be a tutorial, merely an addition to my tutorial above, the actual time taken to create the zombie was 13 minutes, but I have sped the video up to fit inside 4 minutes.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=BTMIjvZ8DL4
thanks for the GREAT post! Very useful…
Love this tutorial.
this is how mine came out
Great tutorial. This is only my third day using photoshop, so with a little practice I’m sure i could do better. Learned a lot, though. Here’s my result.
http://www.geneseo.edu/~jrj3/zombie.jpg
This is too cool!.. but I cant get the teeth to fit “nicely” with the “living” and “dead”(wrong size and distance) but the rest fits perfectly! ^^
this is good effect in the photoshop I like it plz send some more effect in myid
Awesome tutorial! Keep on the good work!
what is tonemapping?thnx
Hey, Thanks for the Tut. I didn’t quite follow it bit for bit.. Just the basics but here is mine.
(If that dosn’t work - Link to Original: http://www.imagecross.com/myspace-image-upload-viewer-7.php?id=4167Skull.jpg)
the tutorial is good but i get stuck with the layer mask for hours, especially the second time. it never works for me.
“Set the layer mode to `Multiply”.”
I can’t seem to find how to do that, any help!?
On the layers panel, highlight the layer then click the `layer mode` drop box at the top of the layers panel - choose Overlay from in there.
Amazing!!!
I have done 3 pictures inspired by this, one im proud of, one im ashamed of, and one im semi ok with.
Sadly, they went in THAT order. My first was my fave, but i overlaid the skull, and it ruined it.
The second one turned into planet of the apes
The third one, i left the skull alone, but its color just isnt right… and im still having trouble with the scars…
great tut
wow i loved this.
mine came out REALLY good.
oops, it didnt work.
here it is:
http://i27.tinypic.com/33nc7sl.jpg