How to Tattoo Anyone with Photoshop

Long ago, tattoos belonged in the domain of bikers, servicemen, and maximum security inmates. Over the last 25 years or so, we can find body art on everyone from soccer moms to the mail man. We’re going to learn how we can use Photoshop to put tats on just about anyone. Let’s dive right in with the two images below. The first is our subject about to get inked, from Faestock. The second is some vintage flash from my collection.

Summoning the Inner Tiger

In order to show a wild side to this demure young lady, we must first prepare our tiger. To save us time from doing lots of erasing on picture 1, we’re going to use the Lasso Tool to highlight around our noble beast in image 2. Then we go to the top menu bar and select Edit/Copy. From there we bring image 1 back up and select Edit/Paste.

“But dude,” you say. “That tat looks way too big for her arm. She looks more like a ballet dancer than a power lifter.” At this point it’s all good, because this is about way more than cutting and pasting. It’s about formfitting our body art to the model’s arm. Can’t you just hear the buzz of the needle and smell the green soap? Our Photoshop tattoo parlor is open for business!

Now we’ll go to Layer/Layer Mask/Reveal All on our tiger, which is now Layer 1. After making sure our foreground brush is set to black, we’re going to remove some of the white space. We’ll use a soft edged brush, size set to 65, Normal Mode, with 100% opacity, and we remove the white. Don’t worry about erasing the blue cloud effects near the tail. Since we’re masking, we can always bring back anything we need to make the image right later.

Impressing Mom

Once we have taken care to eliminate the white space adequately from Layer 1, our next task involves fitting this noble beast within the model’s arm. Go to Edit/Free Transform so we can set the first layer correctly and scale it down.

“Hey,” you say, over the buzzing of the tattoo gun. “It still doesn’t quite fit yet.” In order to make the tiger realistically form to the contours of her arm, we’re going back to Edit, but this time we’re going down to Transform/Distort. It’s okay if the proportions of layer one are out of whack since body art should fit the wearer, not the other way around. We may want to return to Free Transform at some point, and/or use the Move Tool to get it just right. Oh, and don’t mind her friends behind you taking pictures with their cameraphones. They still can’t believe she’s doing this.

Making It Sink in Forever

Once we have transformed, distorted, and moved Layer 1 to our satisfaction it should fit in like so:

Now, we are going to use layer effects to make the ink seep into the arm. After we make sure that we have the image itself highlighted instead of the mask in the layer palette, we go past the point of no return. She’s taking it like a pro, but she’s glad when you wipe down her arm with some green soap before firing up the gun once more. Go to the layer palette and set the style for Layer 1 to Darker Color. Note below how some of the white yields in the right places to the skin underneath, much like a real tattoo would.

Now to make it look more drawn onto skin than pasted onto pixels, we’re going to return to Layer 1′s mask, with our foreground brush color white. We’re going to carefully bring back some of the leaves around the edges as well as around the tiger’s paw to eliminate the fuzziness.

Now to send our valued customer off with an impressive bit of ink, we have to get Layer 1 to settle in with the existing levels of brightness, saturation and contrast. We go to Layer/New Adjustment Layer/Hue/Saturation and pull the Saturation slider back to -45.

Now we make another adjustment layer for Brightness/Contrast, setting the contrast all the way down to zero, and the brightness to -10. The colors are little more muted, which makes the tattoo look as if it has been there for a while.

Now we can’t send her off with some packets of ointment just yet. We need to warm Layer 1 up a bit so we’re going to make another adjustment layer, this time Photo Filter. Make sure the Preserve Luminosity box is checked, that we’re using Warming Filter (85), and the Density slider is set to 65%.

Now we’re going to gently soften the edges on Layer 1 (make sure it is highlighted in the layer palette, not the mask, nor the above adjustment layers we made) by going to Filters/Gaussian Blur and set the radius to 0.5 pixels. Now the hard work is done, and we can decide on our composition and mood. So after we take a break, flex our fingers, we’ll fire up the gun one more time to add the finishing touches.

Focusing on the contrast between the tiger’s energy and the model’s reflective expression, we can see how that is what drives this piece. So we’re going to crop it down to zero in on that. We will click on the Rectangular Marquee Tool and then go to Image/Crop, and select the area that is visible in the screenshot above.

Now go to Layer/Flatten Image, then to Filters/Filter Gallery/Distort/Diffuse Glow. Set the Graininess slider to zero, the Glow Amount to 4, and the Clear Amount to 9. Enhancing the gentle nature of this photo with this filter enhances the raw contrast of the tiger on her arm, making that orange seem to punch through. She is telling the world that she does indeed have teeth! RAWR!

Our customer handled her first tattoo extremely well. So now all that is left is to make sure she knows to take the bandage off after a couple hours, keep it moist with all those packets of ointment we gave her so it doesn’t scab, and don’t go swimming until it heals. Oh! I almost forgot, we need to take a picture for the studio portfolio.

We learned today that putting body art on a picture is much like an artist doing so to an actual person. We can show hidden strengths or weaknesses or even whimsy by using the tools at our disposal to make virtual body art as real as we can. Then we enhance those statements with careful use of filters, only after we are sure the hard work is done with a careful hand.

Now, if you all will excuse me, I think I may use some of the techniques we did with a picture of my cousin, a tattoo of anchor with “mom” written on it, and send a little something to my aunt to freak her out.

Tagged as: Photoshop