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Get Bigger Muscles using Photoshop - Lasso Tool

Posted on 28. Feb, 2009 by Shawn in How-To, Photoshop

In a previous post I showed you an easy way to increase your muscle size using the Liquify tool. In this post, using Adobe Photoshop, I’m going to explain a more detailed way of accomplishing the same goal yet rendering higher quality results. Remember, less is more when editing in Photoshop. You don’t want to end up looking like that steroid guy on the Discovery channel who’s arms exploded. Lets get started.

Increase Muscle Size with Photoshop:

1. Open your photo within Photoshop and go ahead and increase the view to 200% focusing on one arm at a time.

2. Get out your Magnetic Lasso tool from the tools window. If you cant find it, go to the “Window” tab and check mark “Tools”. To access the Magnetic Lasso as opposed to the regular or Polygonal Lasso, hold down on the icon to bring up the other options.

3. Trace out the arm with the Lasso, keeping a natural flow around the edge of the arm. The beauty of the Magnetic Lasso is that as you move along the edge of the arm it will automatically trace appropriately. This isn’t always the case though. If the lasso isn’t cooperating then left-click every 1/16 of an inch or so to create your own path.

Try and keep a rounded look when coming over the shoulder. Stay to the outside of the chest, coming back to the arm at the shoulder pit area.

To finish out the selection come back over the wrist in a straight line and click on the beginning of your trace.

4. Right click on the selection and choose “Layer via Copy” to insert the selection on a separate layer.

5. This is where it gets a little tricky. With your newly created layer selected, hit CTRL+T to activate the free transform option or go to Edit>Free Transform… Stretch the free transform selection of your arm away from the body to increase the muscle to your desired size.

Once you get your size right, you’ll need to rotate the arm by moving your cursor to the bottom corner of the free transform box until you see the curved arrow icon. Rotate back towards the body just a hair to match the angle of the original arm.

Now use the arrow keys on your keyboard to move the selection back towards the body until the original arm is covered by your new arm. Pay attention to the shoulder to make sure it keeps a natural look. You may have to play with this step for a while, but you’ll get it. There will be a size difference in the wrist, don’t worry about that for now, just make sure that the new wrist is in line with the hand. We will clean up that part in the next step.

6. Now let’s clean up that wrist and any other imperfections. Use the erase tool to clean up around the hand area. Use a brush size that you are comfortable with and delicately erase parts of your new selection until you create a natural flow between the hand and wrist.

There are two options for cleaning up the unnatural tone colors between the hand and wrist. Note: Remember that you are still zoomed in at 200% and that at the original size this will not be as noticeable.

1. Blur Tool - use the blur tool to slightly blur the contrast area.

2. Clone Stamp - Use the clone stamp tool to clone skin colors from nearby areas and remove the obvious contrast.

Play around with this step for a while to get the results that you are after. Zoom back out to 100% and look over the image closely looking for any obvious imperfections.

7. The next logical step would be to do the other arm and then enlarge the chest, neck and do some touch ups on the torso. We’ll save that for another post. Here is a closeup of the before and after of the arm only.

Wipe the sweat from your brow, you just gained a ton of muscle mass without lifting a single weight.

Related posts:

1. Get Bigger Muscles using Photoshop - Quick Way
2. Photoshop: Design A Clean Glossy Button
3. How To Make A Polka Dot Pattern In Photoshop
4. How To Make Reflective Mirror Image Text Using Photoshop
5. Photoshop: Create a Glossy Web 2.0 Button

Tags: Photoshop, Quick Fix