How to remodel lipsticks to your taste Part 1 (easy)

You got some Sims 2 lipsticks, looking great on preview pics from a site, but once you put them on a Sim of yours, the result is different, not what you expected.

This might be the case for lips looking "bucket filled" (because of their very white alpha), for Asian "doll lips" (put on Sims with rather pale skintone), or with weird looking open lips with teeth.

THIS IS THE PART ONE - AN EASY PROCESS for lips without a clear visible lip gap, which I want to modify.

I got Maynarakmak lips, glossy but the gap between the upper lip and the lower lip doesn't look clear enough for me. It's a set with only four lip colours, consequently it's fast to remodel each.

First I choose my Sim model, clone it and remove her make up and choose a Maxis bun, so that the face looks clearer while testing in Bodyshop.

Here she is wearing the original dark orange Maynarakmak lipstick :



In my Downloads folder I only kept a restricted choice of other creators' lips to test on my Sim :



Now I close Bodyshop and open up SimPE, in order to select the folder with Maynarakmak lips :



I go to the Image texture option of SimPE to extract the texture of each lipstick package, one by one :



Next I export the texture layers and why not the alpha channel :



Best is to rename each texture layer like 01, 02, 03, 04, etc. and Alpha for the Alpha channel - this is because SimPE might not want you to extract a layer with the original name string, when it's too long or for any unknown reason.

What it should be like in the Maynarakmak lips folder :



After having closed SimPE, I reopen Bodyshop and create a new lipstick project. I've chosen Nabila's Bad medicine lips and I'll use her lips alpha as well :



Notice the difference between Maynarakmak lips alpha and Nabila's Bad medicine lip alpha :



This difference to discern is important, as from the alpha channel you'll know if a lipstick is "oversized" (this is not the case for Maynarakmak's chosen lips set), will have a solid texture without transparency parts, etc. Nabila's alpha has a more visible lip gap and the mouth width is smaller, which on some skintones will have lipsticks of better effect. Too wide stretched out lips, especially very pale ones will look disastrous, even if you add a lipliner or lip contour on them. It's the case for some Guagua lips.

Now I open up my digital image programme, which for me is PhotoFiltre Studio X. Bodyshop is still open and has to stay open.

As I extracted Nabila's Bad medicine lip texture in SimPE, I open it as a 512x512 image with transparency (it's PNG). With the cropping tool I select the lip gap part very meticulously, more exactly like this :



After I also opened the layer of a Maynarakmak lips texture and put it on a background image filled with a matching colour (from the lip texture), I paste Nabila's lip gap as upper layer :



The lipgap needs some smoothing out (value 2 only in PhotoFiltre Studio X).

Now the final project result is here (close view) :



I'm happy with the result, and after I imported the project in Bodyshop here is what I got :





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There are some other tips to make lipsticks look better, like adding/modifying glossiness, adding teeth. But this will be explained in another part.