Wape: How to Efficiently Impregnate a Jpeg

Someone asked in the comments how I photoshop up pregnancy photos from regular ones, so I figured I'd write a brief tutorial on how I do this.

Denisse Gomez, if you're wondering.

(Edit: I just realized I posted this without a jump break, adding one.)

A few things I should mention before we get started: I am not an expert in Photoshop, and I don't use the most recent version of it. Also, generally my goal with Photoshop compositions is to get them done within a reasonable timeframe; I don't like spending hours on things, and once finished I generally resist the urge to go back and fiddle with it unless I see something egregious that begs to be corrected. This is my philosophy and the below is the technique I've developed based on it; if you know of a better way to do any given step, let me know. (Once I'm done the tutorial, I'll list a few things about this Jpregification that I would fix on a second pass if I gave it one.)

You will need a certain level of Photoshop comfort and literacy for this. That said, I'm not doing anything super esoteric so if you don't know how to do any given step you won't have any trouble finding out through google.

Ultimately, I want to emphasize the fact that mine isn't the only way to do it, or necessarily the best, or necessarily the best for you, and even if you follow my method you should always keep your mind open for ways to improve on it or make it suit your own abilities, aptitudes etc.

1. Picking an Image

How easy the task is greatly depends on the image you choose. In my experience a shot of a girl facing straight at the camera is the hardest to do; the best for front shot is one where she faces to the side to some degree. If she's facing fully to the side (profile) it's probably easy too but shots like that don't tend to be very dynamic. Also, shots where she's facing away from the camera work quite well - the image to the right would be pretty trivial to pregify.

Another factory is what she's wearing. For example, if she's got some sort of sweater on with folds in it around the belly area, it's not going to work if you distort that. Also, if there's some kind of texture on her belly (eg a mesh, or stripes that are a certain level of thinness, or some other pattern) it might look bad when you have to fiddle with it later.

Also things overlapping it in the foreground might prove some issue, or if she has her hands on her hips or something to that effect. These aren't dealbreakers but you'd need to be skilled enough and willing to put in the effort to move/remove these things to get it to look right. You'll get a feel for what's likely to cause problems once you've done a few.

2. Bloat and Warp in Liquify

Open up the image in Photoshop. Duplicate the original image so it sits safe on an unedited layer of its own (in case you need to go back to it).

Liquify your image (Shift-Ctrl-X) (I'm using PC keyboard shortcuts, they may be different in your version). This brings up a window for the Liquify interface, which is used to distort images.

You will make her belly larger using the Warp and Bloat tools. The Warp (W) tool lets you click and drag on regions to 'pull/smear' them, while the Bloat (B) tool will 'expand' the area clicked on. For these, the [ and ] keys to expand/contract the size of the area around your cursor.

If you play around with the above, you should be able to figure out how to warp her belly in such a way that suits your goals. (Maybe make her tits bigger with the Bloat tool while you're at it, she's gonna need to feed that baby after all.)

*If she's in a bikini or nude, you'll have to pay attention to her bellybutton BEFORE you get started in Liquify. In these cases you may find that erasing it using the Spot Healing Brush (J) in Content Aware mode (adjust select this at the top of the window.) Don't worry, you'll be re-inserting her bellybutton later.

Another tool you might find useful is Pucker (X), which is the reverse of Bloat in that it pulls everything in range towards the center - good for shrinking things, sharpening 'corners' etc. Harder to explain how it's useful but you'll figure it out if you try it.

Don't worry about if this distorts the background or some other part of her body (in this case, just her hair). We'll be adjusting for this later.

Press OK when you're done.

Distorted hair/background
has been masked out.

3. Fix Background

As seen above, distorting her body will cause other unwanted distortions in the background and any limbs or objects that are behind or next to the belly. Choose your layer and hit the Layer Mask button (bottom of layer panel, looks like Japanese flag) to give your layer a layer mask. Select the layer mask and use the Brush tool (B) (also resized with [ and ] keys, show and hide the brush size using Caps Lock) to paint 'black' onto the mask layer. Black will mask (hide) a given part of the layer, and by thusly painting (btw you can use X to switch between foreground and background colors, ie black and white, to easily erase/correct as you go).

You could also use Magic Wand (W) tool to select the area if there's enough color consistency for that to be feasible. In the top bar, adjust the Tolerance (how close the colors will need to be to what pixel is being magic wanded in order to be selected) in the top bar, check or uncheck Contiguous (which means 'select only attached areas' vs 'select any area of similar color') as necessary, and hold shift to add additional areas to the areas you've already got selected.

Masked image overlaid on
non-preggified original image.

Often I need to use a combination of Magic Wand, standard painting with the brush, as well as Select > Color Range (which I can't even begin to explain here) to pick the area in the most efficient way possible.

To the right you can see my image when a hole has been dug into the layer, as well as what it looks like when I make the original image visible (which, as I suggested earlier, you should keep a copy of at the bottom layer of your Photoshop composition for just this purpose).

4. Cleaning up Details

You'll notice she has no belly button (I removed it with Spot Healing Brush tool earlier to make Liquifying her into the right shape less complicated) and her round belly has all kinds of shading areas based on how toned it was earlier before she got knocked up. Some of these are more intricate but I'm going to go over them really briefly - the reason for this is a lot of these are dependent on the circumstances of your image and soforth, and also they are easier learned through doing than through my imperfect explanations.

The bellybutton object with the mask I made
for it. I've made it into a Smart Object here for my
own convenience. I use Smart Objects a lot to isolate
things in this way, but I won't be explaining them
and they aren't strictly necessary.

Belly Button

We want to give her her belly button back and airbrush over some of those lines of shadow/highlight to smooth her bastard bump over.

I'd use the Elliptical Marquee tool to draw an epllipse around her belly button on the bottom (original) layer, then copypaste it onto a new layer. Once it's pasted, move it in this layer to approximately where you want it on her belly.

Ctrl-click this new layer to select the shape of its borders, then press the Layer Mask button (bottom of layer panel, looks like Japanese flag) to turn that selection into a mask.

Why did I have you do this? Because if you apply blur to the bellybutton's layer mask, you'll blur the edges of it so it blends better with her belly. Blur it, then adjust Levels of the layer mask (Ctrl-L). I can't really explain the layer mask here but basically you drag these markers representing the darkest color and the lightest so that the edge of the bellybutton object is indistinguishable from where you're placing it, so it looks like it fits.

Shade and Highlight Corrections

As I mentioned, her belly has all kinds of shaded areas that were relics of when she was thinner and you could see the shapes of her muscles, bones and suchlike under her skin. We want to get rid of a lot of that, or at least hide it resonably.

I did this with the Brush (B) tool. I make a new layer (I never edit the original, I put edits on individual layers so I can show-hide them afterward to see which edits were better and which were unnecessary).

I don't know if you know this but if you hold on Alt while you click-drag a layer, it will let you place it above an object in such a way that the object masks it. That's what I've done with the below, in case you're wondering. This isn't necessary but it's a quick easy way to make sure none of the airbrushing spills over onto the background, and also visually organizes a file so you can see what the important layer is and what the subbordinate layers of it are. (See right.)

To the right, you can see all my 'airbrush' layers. I never bother naming them but did so now for illustrative purposes. There's also my bellybutton layer.

So each airbrush layer starts with me using the Brush tool (B), looking at an area of her belly that needs fixing, holding down Alt to use the Eyedropper tool to pick up a color that I feel needs to be applied to that area to smooth it out.

The above settings (soft brush, low opacity percent) are best, and you just spray on that belly, using Eyedropper to pick up new colors and spray until you fill things out as should be made clear when comparing the first image below to the second.

I also added highlight at the top to give the belly a more 3D looking shape, as the top would get more sunlight. (Ironically, I just noticed that the underside that would have more shadow than the original image now has less, but whatever it looks fine.)

Notes and Conclusion

I hope this was instructive and understandable. If you'd like me to screenshot any element in more detail, let me know in the comments and I will (provided it isn't too fiddly or beyond the scope of this tutorial).

Were I to do a second pass, I would put effort into the following.

1) The curve of her belly should be different, with a more downward bias. Not every pregnant belly looks the same irl but I think this would look more 'normal'.

2) There's a certain point where her bikini bottom would probably go behind the belly rather than just along its bottom all the way to her side. I'd probably use the Pucker tool in Liquify and some airbrushing and maybe Clone Stamp tool (S) to do this.