Library Rat

I wanted to try and answer a question I get asked about twice a week right now, which is whether my baby daughter looks like her brothers.

Last quarter I played with some baby pictures of my sons and nephews with the idea of emulating Francis Galton's composite portraits for another class but never used them. I took a different approach and instead of merging one picture each of my children I went for a tiling
effect -- I liked this image by Tetsu Okuhara a lot.

As I was working on the composite the left eyes and mounths aligned near perfectly. The end result was actually a little too uniform, so I went back and tweaked things to make the tones of each pic slightly more different.

Looking Like?

The end result... well, the biggest difference between my kids is apparently in eyebrow shapes and head/jaw shapes (not helped by the huge jowls on my second, who was 99th percentile on the weight charts and the different angles on the shots) -- the eyes and mouths are very congruent. I cropped the picture even tighter to limit the impact of the outlines and concentrate the attention on the center of the face.