This is my second visual assignment, worth 2 stars.  While it is not technically a parent-child headswap, I figured an adult-baby swap is close enough.  There were two parts of this assignment that made it difficult.  The first was selecting just the heads without making them look pixelated around the edges.  The second part, which was more difficult, was filling in the space around the baby’s head once i swapped it.  I wound up having to create artificial sky, but more on that below.

My Process:

I used Paint.NET to complete this assignment.  It is free and can be found here.  To begin, I opened the original images with heads in their correct places.   My first step was to select the heads and copy them to new layers.  First I selected the heads with a rectangle select tool, then fine-tuned my selections in their own layers.

Here is the original image opened in Paint.NET:

Many of the tools available in Paint.NET are just more useful versions of those available in MS Paint.  In this image you can also see a layers box and history box.  The layers box is pretty self-explanatory and allows you to easily manage layers.  The history box is really cool.  It allows you to perform unlimited undos/redos and can restore the state of your project to where it was when you made any edit.  But back to the headswap.  Once I selected a head with the rectangle, I pasted it into a new layer and began erasing everything in that wasn’t part of the head.  I did this using two different methods.  The first was the standard eraser tool, which allows you to select a brush width in pixels.  The second method was using the magic wand tool.  This was trickier than the eraser, but faster and a lot more effective.  The magic wand selects pixels that are similar in color to whichever pixel you click on.  It allows you to specify whether you want to select global or contiguous pixels, the tolerance used to select them, and whether you want to add to, subtract from, or replace your current selection.  I used this to select the sky (sky pixels are a lot more similar than baby pixels), and then I deleted my selection.  This crying baby was the result:

There is more to this post but WordPress cut it off. I might have to retype the rest and submit as a second post