All this talk of chopping pictures....how the hell do you chop a picture? I keep reading about and have seen one or two, however have no clue how it's done? (Plus the mental visual I get upon hearing the word chop is usually either scissors and paper or those big old paper slicing contraptions that schools used to have when i was a kid - yah, yah, yah, I know I'm aging myself ... well I don't care!!)
There are many programs available for this purpose.
If you're looking for instructions on how to go about chopping a picture, I'll be happy to provide you with a free software program and tell you how to get started.
If you're just asking how it's done, it works like this...you open a file in an image editing program, and using a "selection tool" you circle the area that you want to "cut out" or "chop", and you copy and paste it into the windows clipboard. Then you open the picture you want to chop the selection into, and then you paste it, and move it around, rotating, resizing, and orienting the selection until it's in the position you want it to be, and then you "lock it" into place. You can even modify the brightness, contrast and even the colors to match it better to the new image. Using feathering and blending tools, you make the selection appear to be seamlessly part of the new image. Save it, and you're done.
You'll notice that the more amateurish chops don't look very realistic, with "hard" edges around the chopped parts, and positioning of the different selections looking like they were just dropped into place. Often times they aren't even the right size and look disproportionately large or small...of course sometimes this is done on purpose.
The avatar that I use on this board was done using several different programs.
One to blend the image of my head with an image of a troll, one to morph it and create many different progressive images, and yet another to turn it into an animation. I also had to use a 4th image editing program to resize the animation, and a fifth to keep the various frames in order as I created them.
You could probably do all that with just one or two fully featured programs, but like an artist, I prefer to paint with "multiple brushes".
Here's a thread
CLICK HERE filled with chops done of me over at Trollvalhalla by the regulars there, in retaliation for me getting the best of them on more than one occasion...someone put a LOT of time into those...especially the video....lol..
