IrisPark's Fakers Guide

    I've occasionally gotten questions about how I make my fakes, so I decided to put together a guide on my particular process. If you ever give my this a shot, feel free to hit me up and ask for feedback or advice - lets keep the flame of traditional faking alive!

    This is the second version of this guide, which was originally extremely detailed so as to basically teach someone how to use Photoshop from scratch. That never got finished, so this is a more straightforward instruction manual. You may have to look up some terms or go hunting for some buttons.

Tools & Resources

    For my fakes, I use Adobe Photoshop. If you have legal access to that, great! If you don't, it's not too hard to get your hands on. You'll have to do your own research there, though. The exact version I use is the 2025 version - that or anything newer will have all the tools I use. Using older versions may mean certain features are unavailable. If you can't get Photoshop, Photopea is a free online alternative that tries to emulate Photoshop as best it can, though you won't have some features I use and others will be moved around.

    My main source for headshots is Getty Images. There are other stock image collections out there that'll have slightly different pictures, but Getty has a good variety and a less obstructive watermark. For non-traditional celebrities like streamers, SimpCity has good collections of pictures.

    For bodyshots, I have a two-part process. First, I use PornPics to find a shoot that I think I like. You can use a pornstar search to find a model with the right body you want, or use the tags to find shoots with a kink you want to fake. After I've found a shoot I want to use, I look it up on Vipergirls, which will have it in high quality. Go into the Advanced Search, type the name of the pornstar in "Keyword(s):", select Adult Photosets in "Search in Forum(s):", and type the name of the studio (with no spaces!) in "Search by Prefix:" to select the studio. It's a crapshoot whether or not what you want will be there, but always worth looking. If you just want to look at shoots of a particular pornstar or studio, the advanced search can be used for that too. 

    Always use high quality images! Too often do I see promisingly edited fakes muddied by using low quality head and body shots off of Google Images. These sources will get you what you need in high quality.

    For removing watermarks from images, I either do it manually for smaller ones, or Dewatermark.ai for larger ones like Getty's. You only get three free generations a day, so if you're on a faking spree, be smart and make them count. The result will be lower quality than your source picture, but you can combine them in Photoshop and just mask the new parts where the watermark used to be. We'll cover how to do that soon.

Selecting Images

    On paper, there's no two images you can't make work together. In practice, you're going to make your life a whole lot easier finding a headshot and bodyshot that fit together. You should keep pose, lighting, colouring, obstructions, hair and clothes in mind when selecting your images. This can very easily be the most tedious and least fun part of faking - the actual fun part is the editing! But the better a match you pick here, the easier you're making it on yourself later. Brute forcing two images you really want to combine can work out, and you'll probably learn from doing it, but you probably don't want to be doing it every time.

    Most studios shoot with fairly flat, even lighting, and luckily the majority of red carpet shoots will look like this too. For headshots that have high contrast (ie, the dark parts are darker and the light parts are lighter) studios that do the same like BlackedRaw/TushyRaw can be better matches. With both your head and bodyshot, indoor shoots lit just with artificial lighting will be easier to work with than images that have natural lighting, such as outdoor shoots. 

      Tools

    Here's an overview of some of the main Photoshop tools you'll be using in the editing section below. 

• Masks. These are your bread and butter. Put simply, they're a black and white image you can attach to any layer. Where the image is white, the layer will appear. Where its black, it'll disappear. Where it's anywhere in between, it'll be transparent. You're going to be using these a lot. Anything you can use to change an image you can use here; you can paint, blur, use gradients, anything you can normally do to an image. You can apply a mask to an image by clicking a layer and clicking the button on the bottom of the layers menu with a circle inside a rectangle. If you have a selection when you press the button, the mask will isolate just that area. Once a mask is applied, it'll appear next to your layer thumbnail with a chain between them. Your mask will always follow along with your image if you move it; if you don't want it to for any reason, click the chain to disable it.
• Smart Objects. For technical reasons I won't try and explain, it's best to try and have your image layers be smart objects as much as possible; resizing a layer when it's not can result in quality loss, especially if you downscale and then try to upscale again. You can tell a layer is a smart object if there's a little document icon on the layer. If there isn't, you can right click it and select Convert to Smart Object. Note that you can't directly edit the image inside a smart object on your canvas anymore - if you want to do that, double click the layer icon and it'll open the original image in a new canvas for you to edit.
• Adjustment Layers. These are image adjustments that you can structure as layers in your canvas, which gives you a lot of freedom. For example, you can add the Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer, make some changes, and those changes will be applied to every layer below the adjustment layer. If you alt-click in between two layers, the higher one will "clip" to the lower one, basically masking it to only that layer. My documents tend to look like a few image layers with a bunch of adjustment layers attached to each.

The Edit

    Now the fun begins. Here's a run-through of my process for a fake:

• Assemble Your Pictures
• Open both your headshot and bodyshot in separate canvases.
• Use the Object Selection Tool or the Select Subject button to select your headshot. Go into Select and Mask... and adjust the selection to make it cleaner. I usually look at it using Onion Mode, On White, and On Black to make sure it looks good. Once you're happy with your selection, apply a layer mask.
• Using Duplicate Layer, copy your headshot onto your bodyshot. Making sure your headshot is a Smart Object, lower the opacity about halfway and start positioning it over your bodyshot. You want to line up some part of the bodies, usually the head, neck, or collar. 
• Once you've got it in a place you like, make your headshot full opacity again. 

• Mask Your Headshot
• Copy your bodyshot layer and put it above your headshot layer, basically sandwiching the headshot.
• This is a slightly unusual way of setting things up I picked up from a niche tutorial years ago, but hey, it's my method. The benefit here is that we can have a mask on both the headshot and bodyshot, meaning we can make masking changes that do or don't move when you adjust the headshot. 
• Apply a layer mask to the top bodyshot and use the Brush Tool to mask in your headshot. Make sure your brush's hardness is set low so you're brushing with a nice soft gradient.
• Try and mask in your headshot in a way where the transition between the headshot and the bodyshot is where you previously lined them up. For example, if you made their necks line up, use the soft brush to paint across the neck.
• Body parts not lining up right? Use the Liquify tool to move parts of your image around, such as making a neck curve in a different direction or raising/lowering shoulders.  
• Once you've got a solid base, you can raise the hardness of your brush to make some more exact changes. If your headshot has long hair, I'll usually do this along the shoulders and neck to give the illusion of it going behind them.

• Colouring and Lighting
• Once you've got your headshot and bodyshot positioned together, it's time to make them match. Decide whether you're going to try and adjust your headshot to match your body, or your bodyshot to match your head. The former is generally easier; I'll continue assuming you do this, but if you're doing the latter, use Select Subject and the brush to mask the body.
• Create a Black and White Adjustment Layer and put it over your other layers. Create a Levels Adjustment Layer and clipping mask it to your headshot. Black and white will let you more easily tell how much brighter or darker your head is than your body; use the levels to adjust this as best you can.
• Hide the Black and White Adjustment Layer and create a Color Balance Adjustment Layer. Clipping mask this to your headshot too. Have a look at what colors and shades your bodyshot has and try to match them.
• Color matching is a complicated skill that I also can't really teach. I'm good at it because I've done it 10,000 times now and know what to look for. Just mess around a bunch and make little adjustments and you'll eventually figure out the right direction.
• Curves is an even more powerful version of Color Balance and Levels in one. It's also arcane black magic and I've never figured it out, so you're on your own there.
• These two adjustment layers are the main ones you'll use to get a good match, but there's others I often use too. Hue/Saturation's saturation slider can help dull the image or add more color. Photo Filter can apply a color evenly across the whole image instead of in certain shades like Color Blance does. Brightness/Contrast can do the same but for your Levels adjustments. Mess around and see where it takes you. Over time, you'll learn what does what and when you need to use them. If you have to, remember you can use masks to apply adjustments to only certain parts of the image.
• Generally, the better your image match was to begin with, the less work you'll have to do here. You can save yourself a lot of effort by choosing your images wisely.

• Postprocessing
• By now, your fake should look pretty good. These are just some extra things I like to add on top.
• I never told you to delete that Black and White Adjustment Layer from earlier. Turn it back on and set it to blend mode Overlay, then lower opacity. This gives the image a professional, high contrast look that many porn shoots lack. Note that if your image is already high contrast or very bright, such as in a Blacked shoot, you might want to skip this. 
• I like to add some grain to my fakes, giving both the headshot and bodyshot a subtle texture that helps them blend. Instead of using the noise/grain tool in Photoshop, I use this grain image. I put it on top of my fake twice, once at 10% Opacity with Linear Dodge (Add) blend mode, and again at 30% Opacity with Color Dodge blend mode.
• I add a vignetting effect to my fakes as well. Create a black Solid Color layer and put it on top of your layers. Select your whole canvas and use Select > Modify > Contract to make it smaller; I usually do 100 pixels or so. Invert the selection with CTRL+I and then mask it to your Solid Color layer. In Select and Mask, feather the mask to around 200-300 px, then set the layer Overlay blend mode. Finally, I usually select the headshot and mask that out of the Solid Color so it's not being darkened.