Macenstein

Like most kids their age, faithful Macenstein readers Len and Jordan were messing around with Quartz Composer’s input parameters and Photo Booth last Friday night, and they figured out a relatively easy way to create your own Photo Booth masks. And by relatively easy, I mean even I could follow the instructions.

So, If you’ve ever wanted to put your face on Steve Jobs’ near-perfect body, read on!

What is needed:
Photo Editing Software (Photoshop, GIMP, etc…)
http://www.gimp.org/
More iChat Effects 1.2 http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/email_chat/moreichateffects.html
xCode Developer Tools w/ Quartz Composer
http://developer.apple.com/technology/xcode.html

Step 1: Locate a photo of a friend, enemy, celebrity, or whomever you wish.

Step 2: Open that photo with your favorite photo editing software (i.e. Photoshop, GIMP, etc…) and, using the eraser tool, remove the eyes and mouth from that photo. Or just take out the entire face, as we did with the Steve Jobs head above. There are many methods to accomplish this, so we will not go in to detail on this process. Crop the photo to 640 px wide by 482 px high.

Above: Here’s a bad sample mask I made real quick.

Step 3: Export the edited photo as a transparent .PNG or .GIF file. Make sure to enable “transparency” so that the background is not filled. If done correctly, your image should look like a cardboard mask with the eyes and mouth cut out.

Step 4: If you have not done so already, download and install “More iChat Effects 1.2”. This will create more chat effects, one of which we will use for this project.

Step 5: If you have not done so already, install xCode (Developer Tools) from your MAC OSX installation CD or via the download link provide above.

Step 6: Once xCode is installed, open Quartz Composer (Hard Drive > Developer > Applications > Quartz Composer

Step 7: With Quartz Composer open, select “Open Existing” (or, simply select File > Open…) and navigate to your Hard Drive > Library > Compositions folder. Select “Clown.qtz” to use as your template.

Step 8: If opened using default settings, you should see Quartz Composer with Quartz Viewer opened to the right. Select “Patch Parameters” and you will now see the Macro Patch parameter details. It is the “FrontImage” of the Macro Patch parameters that we are interested in.

Step 9: Now the fun part. Open finder, and drag the picture you modified in Step 3 (Transparent .PNG or .GIF) and drag it over the picture of the clown (“FrontImage”). If done properly, the clown image should now be replaced with the picture of your choosing.

Step 10: Only a few steps left. In Quartz Composer, change the title of the center Macro Patch to a name that is more appropriate (shorter names are best). In my example, I changed “Clown” to “Steve Jobs”

Step 11:Then, select Editor > Edit Information and change the name and copyright information of the Quartz project. The name you select here will be the name of the effect you see in Photo Booth.

Step 12:Select File > Save As … name the file and save it in the Hard Drive > Library > Compositions folder along with the other .QTZ files. By using the Save As command, we made a new .QTZ file and didn’t ruin our Clown.qtz effect.

Note – Although you can create a single mask (.QTZ file) and place it in your Compositions folder, it will result in duplicate files appearing in Photo Booth. The only way to avoid this is load .QTZ files in batches of 8. You can save 8 copies of the same .QTZ file, or create 8 unique .QTZ files.

Step 13: Open Photo Booth and have fun!

Thanks again to Jordan and Len who have a bright future ahead of them… doing… something. I’m just not sure what.