For a year, Andres Pinter tormented his brother with monkey pictures.
Once a month, Pinter would e-mail his brother, Nicholas, a genealogy professor at Southern Illinois University, pictures of monkeys in their natural habitats.
Only these monkeys had familiar faces. In fact, they had the professor’s face–and his children’s. “I was putting their faces on monkeys in various poses using Adobe Photoshop,” Pinter said.
Why?
“Purely to bother him,” he said. “It’s all good fun. Our family has a good sense of humor. And it never gets less funny. People always want to put faces on other people’s bodies. It’s the best of Photoshop really. And Photoshop is hard to use.”
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Thus, Pinter looked around and realized there was no easy way to combine faces and bodies, people and places.
So he created one.
After a year of development, Pinter and another brother launched FaceOnBody (a $25 download available at www.faceonbody.com) and simple six-step software that lets users do just that.
“The first step is to choose a body,” said Pinter. “So you can pick a monkey or Britney Spears. We include 200 bodies and background settings with the program, but you can use anything from your computer or the Internet.”
The next step: “Get your unsuspecting victim’s face, and you can put them on the most hideous or glamorous body or place you choose, depending on what your intention is.”
In Highland Park, Daniel Goldberg, 33, was trying to create a unique graphic for an invitation for his 2-year-old son’s birthday party.
“I don’t use Photoshop,” said Goldberg, president of Bridge Investments LLC. “I never learned how. I have three kids and my time is limited. I feel like it would take me a weekend–or a flight to China–to learn Photoshop.”
So Goldberg went online and searched for “cutting and pasting a face onto another person’s body.” FaceOnBody.com was the first link to come up.
“I wanted a five-minute solution,” he said. “And I got one.”
How did Goldberg’s invitation turn out?
“I had a photo of my son, Levi, on a horse and I pasted it into a [country] Western location,” he said. “I also played with putting him on the cover of Time magazine’s person of the year issue.”
FaceOnBody has been available for Windows-based PCs for three weeks.
A Mac version will be available next year.
Now that the program is out, has Pinter’s brother obtained revenge?
“He uses a Mac,” Pinter laughed. “He’ll get me back in the spring.”
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FaceOnBody in just a few steps
– Select a body or other graphic.
– Choose a photo with the face you want to use.
– Cut out the face using a selection tool.
– Trace and smooth out the edges of the face, omitting or including the hair.
– Combine the face with the body, recoloring the combined image so it looks like a single picture.
– Save the file. If you like, you can e-mail it right from the program.
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