Saturday, November 28, 2009

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Famous Look-Alikes

It's Saturday Night again - are you ready for some Genealogy Fun?

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to find which celebrities that have the same facial features that you (or someone else you choose) have. Here are the directions:

1) Go to http://www.myheritage.com/ - you don't have to be a registered member to use this feature. Click on the "Celebrities and Fun" tab.

2) Click on the "Celebrity Collage" tab, and then on the "Create my Collage" button.

3) Upload a photograph with your face (or another person's face) to the site (the face must be at least 100 x 100 pixels) and click on the "Run face recognition" button.

4) Select a collage template, and the faces (up to 8) to go into the collage template. Click on "Next" and "Preview" your template, which should bring up the template for you to review. You could click on "Save" and it would go off to your selected social networking site.

5) Figure out how to show your collage on your blog or social network site (I have my own process defined below).

6) Tell us which celebrities that you (or your selected person) look alike - write your own blog post, make a comment to this post or on Facebook.

7) Think about how you could use something like this as a Christmas gift.

Here's mine:




The system says that my current photograph looks like celebrities:

* Benoit Mandelbrot (who?) - 67%
* Beyonce Knowles - 66% (huh? will Beyonce be bald in 40 years?)
* Kylie Minogue - 64% (poor Kylie - does her celebrity look-alike collage include me?)
* Missi Pyle (who?) - 61%
* Colin Powell - 61% (all right - me and Colin...)
* Darius Milhaud - 56% (who?)
* Alec Baldwin - 55% (I dislike him...)
* Edward Heath - 54% (another statesman!)

At least there weren't any ax murderers or real bad people on my collage list!

I did one for my mother at age 23 and her celebrity look-alikes include Rachel Bilson, Katherine Hepburn (she would have loved that), Cindy Crawford, Elizabeth Hurley, Cindy Crawford, and Helen Hunt.

Here's how I created the JPG image above from the Celebrity Collage on the MyHeritage site:

* Went to full screen (F11 key), then "Print Screen" key
* Opened my OpenOffice Impress (presentation program) and did a "Paste (Ctrl-V keys) operation.
* Right-clicked on image, and clicked on "Save Picture as" and saved the screen shot to my hard drive as a .PNG file.
* Opened my photo editing program (I use Microsoft Digital Image 2006 Standard Editor"), opened the saved .PNG file, cropped it to the collage frame, and saved it as a .JPG file.

Readers may have some other handy method to capture screen images and post them, but that is mine. If you want, please share your methods with the rest of us in your blog post or comments.

Was this fun? It was for me. I can hardly wait to see who you look alike!

9 comments:

my Heritage Happens said...

I went to the site and did mine, however I can't get it saved as a jpeg, bummer. I may just write it up later without the collage, we shall see. This was fun though!Thanks Randy!

Elizabeth O'Neal said...

Mine is here, Randy.

Cheryl (and others having problems), you don't need to save the graphic. After you click on the green SAVE button, you will be presented with a variety of options on where to post your collage. You can click on Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, etc., and will be prompted to enter your log-in info to have MyHeritage post directly to you blog.

What I did was click on OTHER, and then copy the html code. Open a new post in your blog platform (Blogger, for me), then click on the HTML tab and paste in the code. When you return to the Compose tab, you'll see your graphic.

Hope this helps!

Carol said...

Elizabeth, IS THAT HOW THE HTML worked??? Thanx

I did mine with One Note and Adobe Photoshop, I tried to explain here:

http://www.reflectionsfromthefence.com/2009/11/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-famous.html

Randy, this may be the wildest SNGF yet!

my Heritage Happens said...

Thanks Elizabeth, I never went to the green save button or maybe I would have figured it out, but I got it using Randy's basic guide. I am saving both Randy's and your instructions for future reference if needed.

Thanks Randy for the instructions, you can find my post http://heritagehappens.blogspot.com/2009/11/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-famous.html!

Joan Miller said...

Hi Randy, I've posted my celebrity look alike entry....Elton John???!
Thanks for the fun!

Joan Miller said...

In case the link from my name doesn't work, here it is http://www.luxegen.ca/?p=1884

Unknown said...

Here's mine. I used a photo of my Grandmother

M. Diane Rogers said...

OK, Randy, two collages with my 'look-alikes' are up. I was out dancing and singing last night, so I'm a bit late posting.

http://canadagenealogy.blogspot.com/2009/11/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-famous.html

Colleen said...

A bit late, but here is my contribution:

http://omchorations.blogspot.com/2009/11/we-look-like-who.html