To combine faces in Procreate, import both portraits as layers, select the face or features you want from the donor image, and copy them to their own layer. Align them to the target with Transform (Distort or Warp) and Liquify, then hide the seams with a soft layer mask. Match skin tone with a clipping-mask layer set to Color, and finish with shared grain and curves adjustments so the result reads as one face.

The steps below cover full face swaps and hybrid faces built from features of two or more sources. The last sections cover taking the result into a motion pipeline.

What "Combining Faces" Means in Procreate

The phrase covers three different jobs, and the right technique depends on which one you're doing:

• Full face swap: one person's face replaces another's on the target head.
• Feature blend: you take eyes, nose, or mouth from one source and place them on another face.
• Hybrid or morph: two faces are averaged into a new third face, usually by layering at partial opacity and warping both toward a shared structure.

Procreate has no automatic face detection or morphing, so everything is manual: selection, transform, mask, and paint. That is slower than a dedicated face-swap tool, but you control every edge, which suits stylized character work, concept art, and style frames.

Step 1: Choose and Prepare Your Source Images

Most of the quality is decided before you open a tool. Pick sources that match on:

• Head angle: a three-quarter face will not sit convincingly on a profile. Keep yaw and pitch within a few degrees.
• Lighting direction: a key light from camera left on one image and from the right on the other will show through no matter how well you color match.
• Resolution and sharpness: the donor face should be at least as sharp as the target. Upscaling a soft donor is the most common reason a swap looks pasted on.
• Lens and distance: wide-angle close-ups distort facial proportions in ways that won't match a telephoto portrait.

Import both images through Actions > Add > Insert a photo, so each arrives as its own layer. Name the layers right away (for example "target" and "donor"). Face compositing quickly produces many layers, and clear names save time later.

Step 2: Isolate the Donor Face

Select the donor layer and use the Selection tool in Freehand mode. Trace the area you want, including the forehead, cheeks, nose, mouth, and chin for a full swap. For a feature blend, select only the eyes or mouth.

A few practical points:

• Stay inside the face rather than tracing the hairline or jaw edge exactly. A slightly smaller selection with a soft mask is easier to blend than a large one with hard edges.
• Tap the Feather option in the selection toolbar and set a modest value before you copy. This softens the border from the start.
• Use Add and Remove modes to refine the selection around the nostrils, lips, and eye corners.

Then use the three-finger swipe down gesture and choose Cut & Paste (or Copy & Paste) to move the selection onto its own layer. Keep the original donor layer hidden but intact, because you may need to re-pull the selection later.

Step 3: Align and Fit with Transform and Liquify

Move the new face layer over the target head and drop its opacity to around 40–50%. Seeing the target's features through the donor makes alignment much easier.

1. Use Transform > Uniform to scale and rotate until the eye line and overall width match.
2. Switch to Distort to correct perspective if the donor was shot from a slightly different angle.
3. Use Warp for subtle bending, such as matching the curve of a cheek or jawline.
4. Use Liquify (under Adjustments) for fine corrections: nudging an eye corner, tightening a mouth, or matching nostril width. Keep the size moderate and pressure low to avoid a rubbery look.

Align on the eyes first, since viewers read them before anything else. Then check the nose bridge, the mouth, and the jaw. If you can't match all four, favor the eyes and mouth, and let the jaw be handled by the mask and paint in a later step.

For a hybrid face, repeat this with both faces at partial opacity over a neutral base, warping each toward the same landmarks. Procreate's Drawing Guide in 2D Grid or Symmetry mode can help you keep the midline consistent.

Step 4: Blend Edges with Layer Masks

Once the face is aligned and back at full opacity, add a layer mask: tap the layer, then choose Mask. Paint on the mask with a soft round brush, using black to hide and white to reveal.

• Work along the hairline, jaw, and ears first. These are the edges that give a swap away.
• Use a low-opacity brush and build up gradually. Hard transitions look cut out.
• Prefer masking over erasing. A mask lets you reverse a decision without losing pixels, which matters when a client asks to bring back a feature you removed.

If the donor face has hair, glasses, or shadows crossing its edges, mask them out and repaint them on the target instead.

Step 5: Match Color and Tone

Even well-aligned faces fail when skin tones don't agree. A non-destructive approach:

1. Add a new layer above the face and turn on Clipping Mask, so it affects only the face layer.
2. Pick a skin tone from the target's neck or forehead with the color picker.
3. Paint over the face with a large soft brush, then set that layer's blend mode to Color. Lower the opacity until the result looks natural.
4. Mask out the eyes and lips on this layer so they keep their own color.

Then adjust the face layer itself with Hue, Saturation, Brightness and Color Balance to push shadows and highlights toward the target's palette. Use Curves to match contrast: if the target has crushed blacks and the donor has lifted ones, the mismatch will be obvious even when the hue is right.

For lighting problems, add a clipped layer set to Multiply for shadows and another set to Add or Soft Light for highlights. Paint the shadow side to match the target's key direction, such as under the brow, beside the nose, and along the jaw.

Step 6: Unify Texture and Finish

The last step is making the two sources look photographed, or painted, by the same hand.

• Add a Gaussian Blur at a very low value to the donor layer if its sharpness exceeds the target's.
• Apply Noise (under Adjustments) across the face, or add a flattened grain layer over the whole image, so both areas share the same texture.
• Use the Smudge tool at low strength along remaining seams.
• Paint small details, such as a shadow under the chin, a catchlight in the eye, or a stray hair crossing the boundary. These details often sell the composite.

Then toggle the face layers on and off and zoom out. If the face still looks pasted on at thumbnail size, the problem is usually value (brightness) rather than hue.

Common Problems and Fixes

• Face looks flat: the donor's lighting doesn't match. Add Multiply and Soft Light layers to rebuild the shadow structure.
• Edges are visible: widen the feather, paint the mask in more passes, and check the hairline and jaw.
• Eyes feel off: the distance between the eyes or their angle is slightly wrong. Return to Liquify or Transform and nudge one eye at a time.
• Skin looks plastic: too much smoothing or blur. Restore pore-level grain with Noise.
• Uncanny result: the donor and target proportions are too different. Choose closer source images, or paint the transitional areas by hand.

One professional note: if you're using real people's likenesses in client work, confirm that you have the rights or releases before building a composite.

Taking Procreate Face Composites into Motion

Procreate is a good place to resolve a still, such as a style frame, character concept, or storyboard panel. Motion work then moves into other tools.

• Export as layered PSD (Actions > Share > PSD) to open the file in After Effects or Photoshop. Check that blend modes and masks translated as expected, since some Procreate-specific behavior may not carry over exactly.
• Keep the face, hair, and background on separate layers if you plan to animate parallax or do per-layer color work in After Effects or Nuke.
• Export a flattened PNG or a high-resolution version as a reference for any downstream generation or paint-over.
• If you need a quick frame-by-frame sequence in Procreate itself, Animation Assist works for short loops, but it isn't built for the length or resolution of broadcast work.

Static composites don't move on their own. A face blended in Procreate has no 3D structure, so rotating or animating it convincingly takes extra work in a compositing or 3D tool.

Where Styleframe Fits After the Composite

Once you have a finished face composite, Styleframe (styleframe.ai) is one option for extending it into motion without giving up control. The point is not to replace Procreate or your compositor, but to extend a face you've already built by hand into motion while keeping your hands on the controls.

Quick Workflow Recap

1. Pick sources with matching angle, lighting, and sharpness.
2. Select the donor face with a feathered Freehand selection and copy it to a new layer.
3. Align at reduced opacity using Transform, Warp, and Liquify, starting with the eyes.
4. Blend edges with a soft layer mask rather than the eraser.
5. Match color with a clipped Color layer, Curves, and Multiply and Soft Light layers.
6. Unify texture with noise and light blur, then export a layered PSD for After Effects or a flat image for further work.

Combining faces in Procreate rewards patience more than any single feature. Careful source selection, clean masks, and honest value matching do most of the work, and the tools handle the rest.

To combine faces in Procreate, import both portraits as layers, select the face or features you want from the donor image, and copy them to their own layer. Align them to the target with Transform (Distort or Warp) and Liquify, then hide the seams with a soft layer mask. Match skin tone with a clipping-mask layer set to Color, and finish with shared grain and curves adjustments so the result reads as one face.

The steps below cover full face swaps and hybrid faces built from features of two or more sources. The last sections cover taking the result into a motion pipeline.

What "Combining Faces" Means in Procreate

The phrase covers three different jobs, and the right technique depends on which one you're doing:

• Full face swap: one person's face replaces another's on the target head.
• Feature blend: you take eyes, nose, or mouth from one source and place them on another face.
• Hybrid or morph: two faces are averaged into a new third face, usually by layering at partial opacity and warping both toward a shared structure.

Procreate has no automatic face detection or morphing, so everything is manual: selection, transform, mask, and paint. That is slower than a dedicated face-swap tool, but you control every edge, which suits stylized character work, concept art, and style frames.

Step 1: Choose and Prepare Your Source Images

Most of the quality is decided before you open a tool. Pick sources that match on:

• Head angle: a three-quarter face will not sit convincingly on a profile. Keep yaw and pitch within a few degrees.
• Lighting direction: a key light from camera left on one image and from the right on the other will show through no matter how well you color match.
• Resolution and sharpness: the donor face should be at least as sharp as the target. Upscaling a soft donor is the most common reason a swap looks pasted on.
• Lens and distance: wide-angle close-ups distort facial proportions in ways that won't match a telephoto portrait.

Import both images through Actions > Add > Insert a photo, so each arrives as its own layer. Name the layers right away (for example "target" and "donor"). Face compositing quickly produces many layers, and clear names save time later.

Step 2: Isolate the Donor Face

Select the donor layer and use the Selection tool in Freehand mode. Trace the area you want, including the forehead, cheeks, nose, mouth, and chin for a full swap. For a feature blend, select only the eyes or mouth.

A few practical points:

• Stay inside the face rather than tracing the hairline or jaw edge exactly. A slightly smaller selection with a soft mask is easier to blend than a large one with hard edges.
• Tap the Feather option in the selection toolbar and set a modest value before you copy. This softens the border from the start.
• Use Add and Remove modes to refine the selection around the nostrils, lips, and eye corners.

Then use the three-finger swipe down gesture and choose Cut & Paste (or Copy & Paste) to move the selection onto its own layer. Keep the original donor layer hidden but intact, because you may need to re-pull the selection later.

Step 3: Align and Fit with Transform and Liquify

Move the new face layer over the target head and drop its opacity to around 40–50%. Seeing the target's features through the donor makes alignment much easier.

1. Use Transform > Uniform to scale and rotate until the eye line and overall width match.
2. Switch to Distort to correct perspective if the donor was shot from a slightly different angle.
3. Use Warp for subtle bending, such as matching the curve of a cheek or jawline.
4. Use Liquify (under Adjustments) for fine corrections: nudging an eye corner, tightening a mouth, or matching nostril width. Keep the size moderate and pressure low to avoid a rubbery look.

Align on the eyes first, since viewers read them before anything else. Then check the nose bridge, the mouth, and the jaw. If you can't match all four, favor the eyes and mouth, and let the jaw be handled by the mask and paint in a later step.

For a hybrid face, repeat this with both faces at partial opacity over a neutral base, warping each toward the same landmarks. Procreate's Drawing Guide in 2D Grid or Symmetry mode can help you keep the midline consistent.

Step 4: Blend Edges with Layer Masks

Once the face is aligned and back at full opacity, add a layer mask: tap the layer, then choose Mask. Paint on the mask with a soft round brush, using black to hide and white to reveal.

• Work along the hairline, jaw, and ears first. These are the edges that give a swap away.
• Use a low-opacity brush and build up gradually. Hard transitions look cut out.
• Prefer masking over erasing. A mask lets you reverse a decision without losing pixels, which matters when a client asks to bring back a feature you removed.

If the donor face has hair, glasses, or shadows crossing its edges, mask them out and repaint them on the target instead.

Step 5: Match Color and Tone

Even well-aligned faces fail when skin tones don't agree. A non-destructive approach:

1. Add a new layer above the face and turn on Clipping Mask, so it affects only the face layer.
2. Pick a skin tone from the target's neck or forehead with the color picker.
3. Paint over the face with a large soft brush, then set that layer's blend mode to Color. Lower the opacity until the result looks natural.
4. Mask out the eyes and lips on this layer so they keep their own color.

Then adjust the face layer itself with Hue, Saturation, Brightness and Color Balance to push shadows and highlights toward the target's palette. Use Curves to match contrast: if the target has crushed blacks and the donor has lifted ones, the mismatch will be obvious even when the hue is right.

For lighting problems, add a clipped layer set to Multiply for shadows and another set to Add or Soft Light for highlights. Paint the shadow side to match the target's key direction, such as under the brow, beside the nose, and along the jaw.

Step 6: Unify Texture and Finish

The last step is making the two sources look photographed, or painted, by the same hand.

• Add a Gaussian Blur at a very low value to the donor layer if its sharpness exceeds the target's.
• Apply Noise (under Adjustments) across the face, or add a flattened grain layer over the whole image, so both areas share the same texture.
• Use the Smudge tool at low strength along remaining seams.
• Paint small details, such as a shadow under the chin, a catchlight in the eye, or a stray hair crossing the boundary. These details often sell the composite.

Then toggle the face layers on and off and zoom out. If the face still looks pasted on at thumbnail size, the problem is usually value (brightness) rather than hue.

Common Problems and Fixes

• Face looks flat: the donor's lighting doesn't match. Add Multiply and Soft Light layers to rebuild the shadow structure.
• Edges are visible: widen the feather, paint the mask in more passes, and check the hairline and jaw.
• Eyes feel off: the distance between the eyes or their angle is slightly wrong. Return to Liquify or Transform and nudge one eye at a time.
• Skin looks plastic: too much smoothing or blur. Restore pore-level grain with Noise.
• Uncanny result: the donor and target proportions are too different. Choose closer source images, or paint the transitional areas by hand.

One professional note: if you're using real people's likenesses in client work, confirm that you have the rights or releases before building a composite.

Taking Procreate Face Composites into Motion

Procreate is a good place to resolve a still, such as a style frame, character concept, or storyboard panel. Motion work then moves into other tools.

• Export as layered PSD (Actions > Share > PSD) to open the file in After Effects or Photoshop. Check that blend modes and masks translated as expected, since some Procreate-specific behavior may not carry over exactly.
• Keep the face, hair, and background on separate layers if you plan to animate parallax or do per-layer color work in After Effects or Nuke.
• Export a flattened PNG or a high-resolution version as a reference for any downstream generation or paint-over.
• If you need a quick frame-by-frame sequence in Procreate itself, Animation Assist works for short loops, but it isn't built for the length or resolution of broadcast work.

Static composites don't move on their own. A face blended in Procreate has no 3D structure, so rotating or animating it convincingly takes extra work in a compositing or 3D tool.

Where Styleframe Fits After the Composite

Once you have a finished face composite, Styleframe (styleframe.ai) is one option for extending it into motion without giving up control. The point is not to replace Procreate or your compositor, but to extend a face you've already built by hand into motion while keeping your hands on the controls.

Quick Workflow Recap

1. Pick sources with matching angle, lighting, and sharpness.
2. Select the donor face with a feathered Freehand selection and copy it to a new layer.
3. Align at reduced opacity using Transform, Warp, and Liquify, starting with the eyes.
4. Blend edges with a soft layer mask rather than the eraser.
5. Match color with a clipped Color layer, Curves, and Multiply and Soft Light layers.
6. Unify texture with noise and light blur, then export a layered PSD for After Effects or a flat image for further work.

Combining faces in Procreate rewards patience more than any single feature. Careful source selection, clean masks, and honest value matching do most of the work, and the tools handle the rest.