How to create and merge a twin photo of yourself in Gimp.

How to create and merge a twin photo of yourself in Gimp.

By Benjie Dagunan

Intro

In this tutorial we are going to create or merge a twin photo of your fine self. But first, make sure that your two photos have a fixed position two achieve the images like these two images below (these photos are not me. It’s my friend, Janus) :

To achieve this, you must have a tripod for your camera (and attach to it, off course) and place it where it won’t move for your second shoot/photo with different position.

Photoshop’s Rival.

Behold, the GIMP ( GNU Image Manipulation Program ) an open source free alternative to expensive Adobe’s Photoshop. GIMP is free ( is worth to say it twice ) if you don’t have GIMP download it at http://gimp.org or http://filehippo.com and type-search for GIMP then install. Open Up your gimp and lets get started!

Tutorial Details

Program: Gimp 2.8.2

Difficulty: Beginner

Completion Time: 5mins+

Step 1

Let’s open our images and drag it to Gimp Main window. (NOTE: drag the two photos individually. It will create a new tab for the second image if you drag them all) pan> and type-search for GIMP then install.

After we drag our images, we will going to transform one the image into Alpha, to make the removed part transparent, else it would leave a white color.

Step 2

First, Go to Layer Panel. Right Click the Top Layer image and select ”Add Alpha Channel”.

Step 3

Then Go to the Toolbox Panel and select the “Free Select Tool”.  We will use this tool to select our desired area to remove or to select.

Step 4

Before I forgot, go to tool options and click to check “Feather Edges”. Increase it to 70. This will make our selected area to add some soft removed edges to our image.

Step 5

Now select an area or part of the image. Like this one above. In Free Select Tool you can drag it like you’re just painting or drawing up an image. Note: Make Sure that the area is enough to make our second image layer be visible when we remove this area. We just don’t want to make our trick here to be compromise right?

Step 6

Go to the “Menu Bar” and click “SELECT” then choose “Invert” to invert the area we selected. (I like doing invert).

Step 7

The go back to “Menu Bar” and select “EDIT” then “CUT” or just simply press “DELETE” on your keyboard to remove the area. And the result will be like the image below:

Step 8

So far so good.  Means we’re not done yet. Go back to “Menu Bar” and choose “SELECT” and below, choose “NONE” to completely remove that strip lines from “FREE SELECT TOOL”.

Step 9

Houston, We’ve got a problem

This area seems to have a problem. It overlaps (The Feathered Edges) to the second layer. But don’t worry, we can still use the “FREE SELECT TOOL” again and do what we did in the first steps early in this tut’s. Just like this image below:

Step 10

Just select the area and press “DELETE” in your keyboard.

Notes to Ponder

By the way, if you choose the “rectangle tool” in the toolbox, you will end up like this image above. Even if you add a feather effect (rectangle tools’ option) it will not be suitable. It will leave a hard edge. So it means, don’t take a shortcut.

A Removed Area of the top layer image after we use the “FREE SELECT TOOL”. To hide the Second Image just click an “EYE ICON” beside the layer or image.

Step 11 (Continue)

1In this image, our two photos were not align (at least).

1. 1. Go to “Toolbox Panel” and select “MOVE TOOL” to move our layer

22.  Go to “Layer Panel” and select the top layer to be active

then try it to align by your “Mouse” or just press the “Arrow Buttons” in your keyboard.

Step 12

After aligning, go to any of the image in the layers panel and click “right-click” then press “New From Visible”. Our GIMP will create a new layer based on visible layers that were unhidden. Like the image above.

Step 13

Select the “Crop Tool”. We will gonna crop our image titled “VISIBLE”

Step 14

After crop, save your image by clicking “EXPORT” of “FILE” in the Menu Bar.

OUR FINALE IMAGE

Sorry about the text here fella’s! It’s kinda gay. Well, here’s our final image.

Conclusion:

That’s all there is to it! In this tutorials we saw that we can merge our photos with the concept of having a twin brother or sister  without a prior knowledge of GIMP. I've used these  technique in a video where my friend Janus is the star! And it really works (Although the lightning is really bad). You may apply these techniques in Photoshop or any photo-manipulation programs. This is second tutorials, so there would be questions. Feel free to asks and i try to answer it. That’s all folks! thanks for reading.