How to Swap Faces in Photoshop

Photoshop face swap steps in detail

1. Open both photos (File › Open): the one with the face you want, and the one it should go into. Similar head angle and light make every later step easier.
2. Select the face. In the face photo, pick the Lasso tool (L) and draw around the eyebrows, eyes, nose and mouth, staying inside the hairline and jaw. Copy with Cmd/Ctrl + C.
3. Paste it into the target with Cmd/Ctrl + V. Photoshop puts it on a new layer.
4. Line it up. Drop the new layer to about 50% opacity, press Cmd/Ctrl + T, then scale and rotate until the eyes and mouth sit exactly over the originals. Press Enter and set opacity back to 100%.
5. Duplicate the background. Select the Background layer, press Cmd/Ctrl + J, and click the eye icon to hide the original.
6. Cut out the old face. Cmd/Ctrl-click the face layer's thumbnail to load its outline, choose Select › Modify › Contract and enter 5 to 10 pixels. Select the background copy, press Delete, then Cmd/Ctrl + D to deselect.
7. Auto-blend. Select the face layer and the background copy together, choose Edit › Auto-Blend Layers, pick Panorama, tick Seamless Tones and Colors and click OK. Photoshop builds masks and evens out the color across the join.
8. Fix edges and color. On a new empty layer, paint over leftover seams with the Spot Healing Brush (with Sample All Layers on). If the skin is still a different shade from the neck, add a Curves adjustment and clip it to the face.

Why a Photoshop face swap looks pasted on, and how to fix it

• A visible line around the cheeks. The contraction in step 6 was too small or too large. Go back to that step and try 8 pixels instead of 5, or the other way round.
• Skin tone that doesn't match the neck. Auto-Blend evens out tone near the join, not across the whole face. In a clipped Curves layer, adjust the red and blue channels until the cheeks match the neck.
• A blurry or blocky face. The face was scaled up a lot. Start from a bigger, sharper source photo so you shrink it instead of enlarging it.
• A head that seems to face two ways. No blending fixes a face looking left on a head turned to the camera. Choose a source photo with the same angle.

Most of these come down to choosing the right pair of photos. Eight tips for a realistic face swap covers that in more detail, and it applies to Photoshop as much as to AI.

Face swap without Photoshop: the one-click way

Without a Photoshop subscription, or on a phone, Face Swap AI handles steps 2 to 8 for you. Add the photo with your face and the target photo, tap Swap faces, and the AI aligns the face, matches skin tone and light, and blends the edge in a few seconds.

It only touches the face. When we compared four of our template photos with their swapped results, under 1% of the pixels had changed, all inside a box around the face, so the hair, clothes and background stay as they were.

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Photoshop or an AI face swap: which to use

Photoshop is the better tool when a job needs manual control: a composite for print, a face partly hidden by a hand or hair, or a client who wants to approve every edge. For a profile picture, a joke for the group chat or seeing yourself in a new scene, the AI route is faster and usually looks as good.

Questions