Remove face mask?

[mike77]

I am trying to remove Santas mask to fix my kids photo. I tried clone tool, and the spot healing but I think I need to add a mouth.

 

[Rich54]

In addition to needing a mouth, you're going to need the bottom of the eyeglasses, cheeks, a nose, and a realistic hairline for the top of the beard. That's a very tall order, made even more difficult because the base image is so small.

Is this Santa a specific person, or just any generic Santa? If the latter, then I would simply go find another Santa image.

If the former, you'll need an unmasked image of this person to clone his features. I took the Santa photo you posted here a few days ago and cloned the bottom part of that person's face onto your image. I'm not sure if these are both the same person playing Santa, but this is probably the approach you'll need to take.

 

[mike77]

this is the specific santa w/o mask

 

[Rich54]

So now I'm not sure what your question is. If you already have this image of his unmasked face, what more do you need?

If your kids are positioned in a similar photo to this one—except that Santa is masked—then all you would need to do is copy the unmasked Santa's entire head and paste it into the photo with your kids. Then clean up the edges with a layer mask.

Somehow, I get the feeling that I'm not understanding your question.

 

[mike77]

I found the same santa w/o a mask when I copy the face on the other santa the coloring if off. I will mess with it again and post to show the issue thanjs

 

[Rich54]

Try using a Curves adjustment to get the coloring of the unmasked Santa to better match the one where he's masked.

• Use the color sampler tool to select similar spots on both images where the lighting should be identical. I chose a white area on the front of his hat, labeled #1 and #2 where the yellow arrows are pointing
• The Info panel automatically appears, which gives you a numerical reading of the RGB values of those two specific spots.
• Open a curves adjustment layer—a Levels adjustment will also work if you're more comfortable with that—and mask it so that only the unmasked Santa is affected. Then play with the brightness of the lights, darks and midtones to try to get the images to better match. You can see my curves adjustment on the far right.

 

[mike77]

I need to blend the beard

 

[Rich54]

Here are detailed steps to complete the beard:

• Open two files: your masked Santa that you're trying to fix and the unmasked Santa image that you posted yesterday.
• For convenience, temporarily crop the (very large) image of unmasked Santa down to just his head and beard. Then go to Image>Image Size to enlarge it by 3x, which roughly matches the size of your masked Santa.
• Use the Color Sampler tool on unmasked Santa to select a spot of beard somewhere near the point of his chin. As you can see, that spot labeled #1 has an RGB reading of 198, 199, 208.

• Now use the color sampler tool on your masked Santa image and select a similar spot on the beard (below). It has an RGB value of 227, 231, 240.

• Now use either a Levels or Curves adjustment on unmasked Santa to brighten his beard until the RGB values come close to 227, 231, 240.
• In the Levels adjustment below, I moved the white slider to the left, as shown, until the Info panel gave me a reading of 227, 229, 239. That's close enough—a beard has lots of shades so it doesn't need to be precisely perfect.
• At this point you now have a full beard of the correct size and brightness to superimpose over the COVID mask of your masked Santa. Copy this image over to your masked Santa and use Edit>Transform>Scale as needed to tweak the size. Then apply a layer mask to this layer to blend the full beard into your masked Santa.

Here's what I get as my final product: