Create a symmetric mirror face effect with Gimp

Fun Gimp tutorial for beginners where we achieve a perfectly symmetric face by using only one side of the face.

Open an image of a face.

For the end result to look the best, choose a frontal picture of a person facing you as perfectly as possible. If the head is not perfectly centered, leaned to one or another direction you will end up with some freaky looking images, which is necessarily not a bad thing at all. ;)

I'm using the image of Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson.

Choose the Rectangle Select Tool.

Create a selection that splits the face in half the similar way as I did.

If you want your symmetric face to consist of the right half of the face then choose the right side, otherwise choose the left side.

I want my Nick Furry to wear two eye-patches instead of one, so I'm going for the right hand side of the image.

Fine tune your selection by clicking and dragging the selection sides to the left or right.

Make sure it splits the face as perfectly as possible.

In the menu click Select and choose Feather...

Set the Feather selection to about 5 px and click OK.

This way the transition between one left and right side of the new mirrored face will be softer and look better.

Press Ctrl + C to copy the selection and then Ctrl + V to paste it.

In the Layers window you should now notice a new Floating Selection (see picture). Right-click it and choose To New Layer.

If you can't find the Layer window, press Ctrl + L and it should appear.

Now right-click the image, click Layer, Transform and choose Flip Horizontally.

The layer should now be the mirrored image of itself.

If you see the dashed line which represent the layer boundary (like in the picture above) you should hide as it will bother you in the next steps.

To hide the layer boundary, click View and disable Show Layer Boundary option.

Now choose the Move Tool.

As the name suggest, we will move the mirrored layer so it will fit the other half perfectly.

There are two ways of moving a layer. You can either use a mouse and simply it drag it from one side to another, or you can use arrow keys on your keyboard, to move the layer into any direction.

I'll go for the mouse and use the arrow keys for fine tuning.

Click and hold the layer ...

... and drag it to the other side of the image so it will fit the face (see picture).

We are almost there, but I still need to move the layer a bit so it will fit perfectly. As you can see the eye-patch straps are not in perfect symmetry.

I used the arrow-keys on my keyboard to position the layer for the perfect mirror fit of the face.

Choose the Crop Tool.

I need to get rid of the left, original side of the image and the quickest way to do it is using the Crop Tool.

Make a selection and then fine tune it the same way you did with the Rectangular Selection Tool in Step 4.

Press Enter to crop the image.

My name is Nick Furry and I can't see a darn thing!