Ever wanted to know what you would look like with a tattoo without going through the pain of actually having one? Well today you can do just that. Check out my “Creating a realistic tattoo” Photoshop tutorial below.
For this tutorial you will need
Adobe Photoshop / Elements (download from either link)
An image of a person (you can use mine)
The tattoo (any you want, I got mine here)
Lets Begin
First load up your image you want to use (the body/person) and then duplicate this layer by pressing CTRL & J, rename this “Body Layer”. This allows us to work on the image and if we make a mistake we can go back to the original image and start again.
Now load up an image you want to use as a tattoo. The image I used can be found here. Paste this image onto the body layer.
Place the tattoo image on the body. You may need to use the free transform tool to resize the tattoo image. To do this press in CTRL & T and click on the corner of the box that comes up. Also hold in the shift key while dragging the image smaller. This will make sure you image is transformed in both height and width.
You should now have something that looks like the following
Now this image looks great, probably because of the great model in it, however the tattoo doesn’t look realistic, that is unless tattoo shops now cover the outside of a tattoo with a huge white border. So to make this effect look more realistic we will need to change the blending mode.
To change the blending mode, make sure our tattoo layer is selected and click to change the blending mode, this can be seen by our layer pallet. Checkout the image below if your unsure
Then select the blending mode option “multiply”. This will get rid of all of the white in the image. The result can be seen below.
Now this looks pretty good as it is, and at this point you could probably fool your friends into thinking that you have actually had a tattoo, however there’s one more simple step that we can do to make this image look more realistic and this is to change the opacity of the tattoo layer.
To change the opacity of the layer once again look over by the layer pallet and you should see the opacity amount. If you can’t find the opacity box, look at the image below.
Adjust this until the image looks right. I choose 80% opacity and this is the result I got.
And there you have it. A simple way of adding a tattoo to your body without having to endure hours of needles sticking into your skin. If you liked this tutorial please check out our Photoshop tutorials section of this website. If you have any questions please ask below.
Thanks Ricky
Comments
great tutorial, can this be done with colored tattoos?
yes gemma, im guessing you may have to use a different blending mode though. just play about with it and let me know how it goes for you.
thanks for your comment!
woot woo, i tried this tutorial but i kept on stoping to look at the model….dribblllee
great fina effect. i added a gaussian blue to mine to make it look not as crisp. thanks for the tut and keep them coming.
great, easy to follow and to the point.
wow looks so realistic.
she hottie