Micahville

We’ve all seen them. The rather annoyingly well crafted “fakes” of that which is only rumored to exist. How are these fraudulent pictures made? Many of you have wondered. Now you can learn.

The purpose of this tutorial is to present the techniques behind creating a fake image that can be used to trick unsuspecting viewers. We will embark upon our image-editing journey by beginning with the first of seven steps.

Let’s begin.

Step 1

Take a startup picture. It doesn’t have to be extremely blurry (as the quality can be lowered later) but try to avoid direct shining lights as they will make it trickier to edit in the end. Also make sure there is a simple one-colored surface behind it. Open it up in Photoshop (I’ll be using CS3 because I’m feeling a bit leet. But any version should do), and duplicate the layer so you aren’t working on the background.

Step 2

Using the elliptical lasso tool, select the click wheel and duplicate it in yet another layer so that only the wheel is on it.

Step 3

Then, using the cloning tool, remove the click wheel from the iPod surface.

Step 4

After clearing the whole surface, use the blur tool to make touch ups and make it look cleaner.

Step 5

Now comes what can be argued as the hard part. Using the polygonal, select the tail end of the iPod and duplicate it into another layer.

Step 6

Then grab two patches of the background (in this case, the mouse pad) and align them behind the tail so when the layered version is moved up to make the entire iPod shorter, there will be background behind it. You may have to try different patches until you get a smooth transition from the graft and the real thing. a combination of the smudge and sharpen tool can also be effective in concealing the edges of these masks.

Step 7

Grab the tail end layer and move it up the iPod until it reaches a good size. Turn the top click wheel back on and transform it so that the size will shrink to about iPod nano status. Move it and use the arrow keys to micro-adjust it into place.

The Final Product

The final picture should look like this.

To most people, it’s pretty convincing. Not only can you now enjoy making your own fake images, you should be able to sniff out fakes you see turn up on the net from now on. Have fun!

Thanks go to David Hollin.

Have any questions? Comments or compliments are welcome. Any feedback is appreciated, in fact. Leave what you will.

"The Making of A Fake iPod Nano" was given life on on Tuesday, September 4th, 2007 at 8:44 pm and, I think, categorized How To's.