I want to learn how to make spirals and drool to manip pictures of real people, like celebrities. Anybody care to share some know how? Anything helps, I literally know nothing at the moment.

I've never manipped any photos, but there's a reason for that. It's really hard to make a photo manip look right. Much harder than manipping drawings. I've only seen a small handful of manippers who can pull it off well. So, if I were to give any advice, it would just be to recognize that it may be tough. Especially for something like adding drool. Generally, drawn drool will look out of place on a photo no matter what you do.

I hope someone else is able to give you some real tips.

I have very little experience manipping real photos, so take any of my advice on the subject with a grain of salt. From what I have done, I can tell you that it's effectively the same as manipping drawn pics, only - as Mindwipe said - much, much harder.

You're going to want to use Gimp for this. Photoshop is actually much better, but my only experience is using Gimp, so that's what I'm using for the sake of this tutorial.

For the eyes, you're going to want to start by erasing the pupils. I'd recommend selecting the color from the whites of the eyes, then filling in the center of the pupil. From there, use the smudge tool to blend it in with the rest of the eye. If you're going for whitewash eyes, you're done. If you want spiral eyes, you've still got a lot to do.

Before you continue, make sure the layer has transparency turned on. Just select the "Layer" dropdown menu, hover over "Transparency", and if it's selectable, click on "Add Alpha Channel."

Use the fuzzy select tool to select the whitewashed eyes. You'll probably have to muss around with the threshold settings, you don't want to select too little or too much. Cut the eyes, and create a new layer underneath the current one. Paste them onto the new layer. Because the fuzzy select's not perfect, there's going to be some transparent bits around the whites of the eyes. Smudge the sides of the bottom layer around to get rid of that.

Now you're going to want to find a spiral of your choice. I generally just type "spiral" into Google image search and scroll around until I find one I like. Once you've got one, create a new layer inbetween the two you've got and paste the spiral into it. If the spiral is white and black (or white and any other color) remove the white bits via the fuzzy select tool. Once you've done that, create a second copy of it. Use the perspective tool to shrink one of the spirals down until it's the size you want, and angle it so that it looks natural on one of the eyes. Then take the second spiral, and perspective it up to fit the other eye. If you don't want to mess around with the perspective tool, the scale tool also works, but I find that it often makes the spirals look flat.

The final step is touching up any whites around the spiral. As I said, the fuzzy select is not perfect, so there are probably going to be some white artifacts around the sides of the eye. use the smudge tool to fix those up.

And voila! You've got spiral eyes.

I'm sure there are better methods, but this is the one I use. As for drool... you're on your own. I still haven't figured out how to make drool look decent on real photos.

I hope this tutorial made sense. If there are any parts you're unsure about, feel free to ask.

General manipulation tip.

Do not save as .jpg EVER JPG artifacting will begin to ruin your manip pretty fast with various incarnations. Use .png instead. No artifacts. This is Especially true with adding text. JPG artifacts love to show up around text and can make your manip rather hard to read.

As long as you don't use lousy compression, artifacts should be kept to a minimum. I prefer PNGs, but sometimes it just isn't necessary or even possible to use them. For large pics, saving as a PNG can make the file size too large to upload to sites like this. For text manips, I'll try to save as a PNG whenever possible (even then, I only notice problems on JPGs when I use something like a glow effect on the text), but for anything else, I'll generally keep it in whatever format it was originally. GIMP has a slider for the quality of JPGs whenever you save one, and I always set it to 100.

I'm not saying PNGs aren't better. They certainly are. But if you save a JPG in high quality, it's unlikely you'd notice a difference except at high zoom (text effects excluded, as I've learned).

Alright, so I downloaded gimp and have been playing around with it for a couple days. I've just fiddling with a wide eye photo I found on Tumblr, and I was able to white out all the eyes, and I spiraled two of them. I'm still having trouble trying to figure out layers, but I'm doing better than if I did nothing at all, ahaha.
I'm not sure how to save the file in anything besides a gimp file, or something. Every time I save it, I can only save it and open it in gimp.

I've been using the scale tool to get the spirals into face, and I think I'll try my hand at the perspective tool next.

I can answer that one for you. When you go to "save as", just type the file extension you want onto the end of the file name (.jpg, .png). Also, it's a lot easier to open the pic in GIMP by right-clicking it and choosing "Edit with GIMP". Just make sure you save it with a different file name if you don't want to erase the unedited version.

However if you're using a newer version of GIMP I think you might have to go to "File" and click on the option "Export" or "Export to" then click on the file extension that you want. (I'm not really sure of the difference between the two yet. Perhaps it's similar to "save" and "save as".)

From what I've seen, when you save in the new GIMP, you can ONLY save as certain filetypes used by the better image editors, like .psd.

You have to export to save as pretty much anything else.

Wow. Glad I didn't update. Sounds like an unnecessary pain.

Yeah, I'm not 100% sure why they did that, to be honest.

On the bright side, compared to the older version, the newer one has this "all-in-one-window" mode that I love oh so much. No more dealing with all those windows.

GIMP now uses an Export function to prevent generational quality decay, i.e. you can export to JPG as many times as you want without accumulating artifacts because you're exporting from the GIMP image file every time, not repeatedly saving over the same JPG. "Export to" allows you to overwrite the image file you originally opened--it turns into "Overwrite" after you make any changes to your currently opened file.

Ah, I didn't think of that. I figured it must have had something to do with image quality, but I wasn't really sure what, exactly. I'm not all too learned on the subject of file compression.

That's actually quite ingenious. I approve.

I'm confused, as I thought GIMP already did that. For example, if I create a manip with multiple text layers and try to save it as a JPG, it tells me that I have to flatten the image to save it in that format. I click "OK", it does its thing, the pic gets saved, but then I can go back and edit the pic more if I want to. If I move one of the text layers and try to save again, I get the same message about needing to flatten the image. So, as long as you don't close the window, you're still working from the GIMP file.

If you close the window, obviously, you'd have to load up the new JPG and save over it, but unless I'm mistaken, wouldn't you be doing the same thing with GIMP's new setup? Unless you saved a GIMP file for your manip, you'd still have no choice but to load up the newly-saved JPG to edit.

So, yeah, I apologize if there's something I'm missing, but the only real difference I see is it's more convenient on the new GIMP if you plan on saving both a JPG version and a GIMP image file version.