Vincent Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait Turned Into a Photograph ~ by Tadao Cern

Photographer Tadao Cern took one of  Vincent Van Gogh's most famous self-portraits and used some Photoshop magic recreate it as a still photograph. Pretty remarkable job I must say!



Here is Van Gogh's original self portrait. It was painted in 1889 and hangs at The Musee d'Orsay in Paris
(I was lucky enough to see it in person.)

The photographic transformation in progress

tadaocern.com

The final photograph of Van Gogh created by Tadao Cern

tadaocern.com

"I recreated one of the most famous Vincent Van Gogh self portraits as a photography using DSLR and ‘some’ Photoshop tricks. The idea came spontaneously – I saw my friend that has ginger hair and beard and thought that it would be very funny to make a portrait of Vincent Van Gogh. He liked the idea and a week later we met in my studio. After some preparation work we made few shots and after a day of editing the final image I posted it on the Internet. At the moment I have no plans to make something similar but who knows:) I think that this only one image stand quite good for himself as a project already. Funny that a lot of people are confused by the image. Some of them keep asking me if there’s really a guy that looks so alike Van Gogh. Some of them don’t believe that it’s a photo at all. And some of them thought that I really took a picture of Vincent Van Gogh." ~ Tadao Cern


Here is a short video of the Photoshop process Cern painstakingly undertook to achieve the uncanny result.
Revealing The Truth from Tadao Cern on Vimeo.


"First of all, I needed a model with red hair. Than we the help of a stylist we recreated the outfit. And then after basic composition shot I took a lot of detail shots which where incorporated in the main image. It was a lot of cloning, stretching, drawing, pushing, lifting. It was almost as painting a new image looking at the reference and original painting standing next to me." ~ Tadao Cern

Here is a cool video merging all of Van Gogh's self Portraits