How To Turn Vanessa Williams Into Storm

By Robbo

The purpose of this document is to demonstrate some techniques for using computer photo manipulation to turn your favorite actor into your favorite superhero. I am by no means an expert, but I'll attempt to show some simple techniques anyway. This tutorial is written from the perspective of using Jasc Software's excellent Paint Shop Pro (PSP) product. The techniques described could easily be accomplished with any software that uses bitmap layering.

Step 1: Find a good starting image:

In this case we are going to turn the beautiful Vanessa L. Williams (Light It Up, Soul Food) into the uncanny X-Woman Storm. I selected this picture because Vanessa seems to be striking a kind of weather goddess pose. This is our base image, everything else in this tutorial will just be enhancements and alterations to this image.

Step 2: Costume Fits Like A Glove

Most superheroes sport costumes that fit like a second skin. In most photo manipulations I've done, it's a good idea to select an image where the model ain't wearing too much in the way of clothes. In this case, Vanessa's clingy dress works fine. What I've done is, use the freehand select tool in PSP to select the portions of Vanessa's body that will be covered by the costume.

Then, I promoted that selection to a layer all its own. With layered painting, the original image is still intact, but I also have another layer that contains a copy of the dress and arms that I selected. I can work with the costume layer completely independent of the original layer.

OK, so I've isolated the costume layer. I then apply a built in special effect of PSP called chrome to change the image from it's original texture to the silvery look you see above. That's it really. One cool side effect was that the edges of the dress, the straps and the edges of Vanessa's arms all came out looking like seams, which I kind of liked so I left it it.

One problem I had was that the dress disguised the legs. I basically had to reconstruct the legs on this layer to match Storm's look. I actually copied the edges of the arms and pasted them down where I thought the legs should go. I used the cloning brush to fill in the gaps with textures found elsewhere on the costume.

I also wanted to add a belt line to the costume. I actually copied the "neckline seam" down to where the belt should go, and stretched it out a bit so that it wrapped around Vanessa's waist. I used a bevel tool that's built into PSP to give the belt line a little more definition. Finally, I used the softening tool to smooth it out.

Onward To Step 3...

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