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 If you're anything like me, you've seen them roaming all over the net and yearned for your own Bush-Monkey. You were never quite sure how to go about making one, and were hoping for someone to show you a step by step guide. Also, you just couldn't get around to teaching yourself the basic photoshop features unless there was some cursory political message to go along with it. It's really quite easy and if you follow these steps you can have not only a monkey, but a full family - a Bush Monkey, a Blair Parrot, a Cheney Mongoose, why anything really.
Step 1
 Find a picture of a monkey or some such animal. You might go to a forest or a zoo. I went to google.
Step 2
 Find a similar picture of that world leader. You might go to an embassy, a capitol, or the G8 conference if you prefer. I, again, went to google. I guess it all depends on your level of laziness.
Step 3
Open up the picture of the animal in Photoshop (File>Open).
It will come in as the 'Background Layer.'
That's just perfect. You can keep it as that. If you don't see your layers palette, open it up under Windows>Layers (F7).
Step 4
 Open up the world leaders picture (File>Open again). Then with the Move Tool selected (Pictured on left) in the tools palette (hotkey V) drag that picture from one window to the other, so it appears on top of the animal picture. Good times.
Step 5
To make them the same size you need to transform the world leader picture. A good trick is to look through the leader so you can see the animal that lies beneath. It's easier to match the size when this is done. This is done by lowering the opacity of the leader layer in the layers palette.
 If that proves to be too much clicking, you can also change the opacity by typing the number of what opacity you want. For example, if you want an opacity of 56% (and you do) - type 56 and it will become 56%. I'm a sucker for hotkeys so that's the approach I take.
Step 6
It's very easy to transform a leader, making it match the animal. You go to Edit>Free Transform or hit Ctrl+T (Cmd+T on the Mac, but this is the only time I'm making that distinction).
 Grab a corner and drag it until it matches the animal below. You might need to move it around a bit. If you press inside the leader's center he will move around for you. Press enter when it mostly matches. For more information about the transform tool and some further tweaks, you can take a brief look at this page.
Step 7
Now you must hack away at the leader until it's almost impossible to tell where the real human ends and the animal begins. Wow, this joke is starting to get old. It's a good thing this is actually a useful tutorial or you'd have no excuse to continue this tutorial. This step's a little tricky (there are simpler ways to go about it, such as just using the eraser tool and varying its opacity, but this is the best way).
 First bring the opacity of the layer back up to 100%. Either click 0 or move the slider in the layers palette. The leader should be covering the animal right now.
 Then, at the bottom of the layers palette, click the mask button. You'll see a square appear next to the leader layer in the layer palette. Wherever the square is white you can see the image on that layer. Where it's black you can't see that layer's image. Where it's grey you can see somewhere in between those two. I hope the image below clears up what masks do.
  Now in order to change the color inside of the mask you use a brush. I won't go into all the details of the brush tool ( b), as I already did here. If you're not into clicking links, you can get by by knowing only that you can change what color the brush is by clicking the color box at the bottom of tools palette.
A window pops up (pictured above) and you can press what color you want from that spectrum. Go about switching from black to white to grey as is appropriate. You can switch the brush size by right clicking and adjusting the slider as needed in the menu pictured below.
 Something I will not do in this tutorial, as I know it will confuse you, is talk about the hotkey d, which sets the foreground color to black and background color to white (well, go ahead, try it). I also won't mention x, which switches the foreground and background color.
 I definitely won't go into the [ and ] keys that change the size of the brush or how you can press a number to change the opacity of the brush. I won't even explain how to change the softness of the edge of the brush (Shift+[) as those are all covered in the link on brushes you already clicked on. Oh great, now I've gone and confused you with things I won't mention-just use the eraser tool, admitting defeat, and make sure to not run out of undoes (Window>History for multiple undoes). Do remember to change the opacity of the eraser up in the status bar on top for more variety.
 I hope this step didn't confuse you. It had masks and the brush tool. That's a lot to throw at a person, but if I'm showing you how to do this, you'll be doing it right.
Step 8
 Here's where we see the politicians true colors. Before I tell you how to adjust colors, make sure of a couple things-first make sure that you don't have the mask selected in the layers palette and instead now have the layer selected. The picture on the left should make that clear. Also, make sure that the politician layer is on 100% opacity. Now that that's all taken care of we move to the final tweaks.
Color adjustments can be found under Image>Adjustments> (Butload of options, of which you only need to know 2 for now). For this picture I'll start by adjusting the color balance as Bush looks a bit red in the face (but let's be fair, he has plenty to be red about.) Color balance allows for the reds, blues, and yellows (along with the rest of the colors for that matter) to be adjusted and is found at Image>Adjustments>Color Balance... or Ctrl+B. I moved things around like so, but it will be different depending on the image:
Play around with the options and it should make sense. Keep in mind that the 'Shadows' and 'Highlights' bubbles allows you to control the non midtones part of the image. I have further adjustments on both of those sides, but I see no reason to bore you any more then necessary.
I'm still not satisfied so I added Curves onto it for that final touch. That's found in Image>Adjustments>Curves... or Ctrl+M. I'm using curves to get rid of a little red and make it a bit more contrasty. I made it more contrasty by nudging up the curve in the initial RGB curve line.
I made it less red by clicking on the red drop down at top where it says RGB and bringing down the red. Moving these lines around can create very powerful changes. It's important to use constraint with any color adjustments to avoid that photoshopy look. Sometimes I'll also use Hue/Saturation, but that should do it for this image. Actually, I use Color Adjustment Layers, but I didn't want to confuse you. You've learned enough as is-both about photoshop and how to bring out the animal that lurks beneath.
And that's it. Now send me - thebulfrog [at] gmail.com the combinations you've made so I can post them and start a nice little collection of zoo leaders to inspire others to try taking on photoshop and the government themselves.
Below I answer Anestis, who took on the challenge of creating one, and I get into much deeper detail of my own process.
More Bush Monkeys
Hey Anestis from Greece,
Thanks for the email-you're the first to send me one, so I'll use you as an example. Great start - you're on the right path. You did a good job of aligning the two images, and with a little push you're there. Nice idea adding that hole for the monkey nose. Below I have what you sent me, and where I took it with a little tweaking.
 
The first thing I saw was the bush layer had a lower opacity-this is due to the use of grey and black rather then white and black in the mask as shown below.
To fix that select the mask in the layers palette and go to Image>Adjustment>Levels (Ctrl+L). Bring the white arrow on the right to where the big vertical line is (about 159.) This shifts everything brighter then a 159 grey to white.
I assume you lowered the opacity of the bush image to get the colors closer...or maybe it was by accident. If it was for the first reason-it's better to lower the opacity of the whole layer (done at the top of the layers palette) and simply use the mask as a mask with the full spectrum of black, grey, and white. I can see how that was confusing in my tut. The part masked out should be mostly white, with some grey around the edges, and possibly in other areas as needed.
It can get pretty confusing so let me step through my process.
I went into your image and took the mask from what you had and turned it into this (which means nothing until I explain how I got there, below).
I used Photoshop's brush tool and my wacom to accomplish this. Here's my tutorial on how to use the brush tool, but let me go through what you need to know right here. Most of what you need to know with the brush is pressing and dragging creates a stroke.
For masks I only use black and white (you can automatically set those as the colors by pressing d). Grey is accomplished by lowering the opacity of black when white is the background or white when black is the bg. I switch between the two colors by pressing x. I could also press the curvey arrow to the top right of the colors at the bottom of the tools palette, but that takes time. I change the size of the brush with the [ and ] keys. [ makes the brush smaller, while ] makes the brush bigger.
Also important, when I want to blur the edges I can press Shift + [ repeatedly, and to sharpen the edges I press Shift + ] repeatedly. I could also right click and move the slider, but why waste time? I'd rather fill my mind with endless shortcuts.
One more shortcut, if you'll indulge me, and then I'm calling it a day. Press 1 through 0 to get from 10% to 100% opacity with the brush (make sure brush is selected when you press 1 through 0, otherwise it will change the opacity of the layer). You can also change the opacity of the brush with the slider in the options box on top.
My general approach is to first delete the parts of the image I won't need (either with the eraser or just quickly lassoing around it and pressing delete). After that junk mask is taken care of I apply a mask and start going in with a brush. I get the most control when I set the brush at around 40% to 60% opacity (sometimes even less) and do a number of strokes to create a nice gradation. This is a trick I learned by painting. If I take too much out, I just press x (changes brush from white to black), and push the picture in the other direction (by painting in black this time).
Try matching the contours of both pictures - the seem should exist at the jaw line, brow line, where the nose meets, etc. If there's a section in both pictures where they're very dark or both very light or both the same color, for that matter - that's a perfect place for them to meet. Avoid straight lines at all costs, and really try to make it so you can no longer tell where one image ends and the other begins.
So that's how I got the mask from where it was to where I took it.
The colors were the last thing that needed changing. I applied the following changes (actually I did this before fixing the mask, so I could make sure the two images matched up.)
I started with this.
First I took down the saturation.
Getting me this.
Already a big improvement. I could stop there, but figured I'd add in a couple more for the sake of example and improving it further. I adjusted the Color Balance next. Remember there's three different windows (Shadows, Midtones & Highlights) you need to get into to change that.
That got me to this:
Then I adjusted the curves. I didn't touch the main curve, but using the RGB drop down box I went into Red and blue and changed those, especially the top right point. I probably could have simplified by doing this with levels, but I like curves so that's how I went about it.
That got me to to this.
There was a big difference as far as image quality between the monkey and bush. It's impossible to add information to the bush image, so I blurred the monkey image out instead to make them match. I went to Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur and set it to .7
Then I called it a day as I need to stop procrastinating and start getting some other things done. It's a far cry from the perfect, with both the mask and the colors needing plenty of tweaking. Part of the problem is that the two images were so different that they were much harder to match then the example I used.
In the future try to get images of high quality (100K+, often found CC on flickr or by taking the images yourself.) Make sure you can see how the two might fit together even before making the first change. It all comes down to the source images. This is something I've learned the hard way again and again. It's amazing what crap I've created in my day.
Real quick, here's the progression side by side.
Download the psd file
All right. I'm done. If anyone else wants to send in their images, I'm happy to crit. It probably won't be this extensive, but it will be something. Also, I'd love to see political figures other then Bush messed with.
Wow, that was a good answer-this lasted almost as long as the tutorial itself :)
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