Section 10.5. Satisfaction in Liquefaction


10.5. Satisfaction in Liquefaction

Ever since Live Picture went away and left us stranded for a really good fictitious imaging tool, illustration photographers have been making do with Photoshop's Liquify filter. Liquify lets you treat any shape as though it were made of modeling clay. Have a client who's a bit on the heavy side? No worries. Liquify is Photoshop liposuction. Want to turn a person's face into a caricature? Liquify is marvelous for making ear-to-ear smiles and bug eyes have never looked so buggy. Figure 10-14 shows you a pair of familiar pets, before and after liquefaction.

Figure 10-14. The grins and bug eyes on the dogs' faces.

Like everything in this chapter, Liquify is maximally destructive, so do anything you plan to do with it on a new layer. Here's how I made clowns of the dogs:

  1. First, knowing that I didn't want the Liquify filter to affect anything in the image except the dogs, I placed a selection around them that ended at the leash. I had no intention of modifying anything below the leash, either. When you then choose FilterLiquify, the Liquify dialog opens. As you can see from Figure 10-15, the Liquify dialog is another one of Photoshops applications within an application.

    Figure 10-15. The Liquify dialog after selecting the dogs. I have already come pretty close to the final effect using nothing more than the Bloat and Push tools.

    NOTE

    At the bottom of the dialog is a checkbox called Show Backdrop. Check it if you want to see layers in the same image. You can choose All Layers or a specific layer and whether you want the other layer to appear in front or behind the Liquify layer. If you use a knockout, you can display the originating layer beneath the Liquify preview. That way, you can tell how well your distortions of the knockout will fit into the background. You can also tell whether or not you need to clone background into the part of the image that the knockout was "lifted" from.

    You could use a grid over the image to help you visualize how much and where you've distorted the original. The grid is called the Mesh. To use it, just check the Show Mask box. You can choose the Mesh's color and size from menus.

    When the dialog opens, the red color designates the area masked by the selection. You could paint a mask around the edge with the Freeze tool or erase it with the Thaw tool. Both are just above the Hand tool in the Toolbox. Masking protects areas from being distorted by the other Liquify tools so that you don't smear parts of the image unintentionally.

  2. I wanted to make these cute little dogs to look silly, so I bulged out their eyes by sizing a brush just slightly larger than what I wanted the eyes to become. Then I centered the cursor over the eyes and pressed until the eyes were the size I wanted. Be careful not to press for too long. The thing you're bloating won't get any larger than the brush (unless you move it), but the program will keep pushing the center out toward the edge until there's no more detail left in the center. I've applied sunglasses using that technique.

  3. To make the ears larger, I used the Thaw brush to open larger spaces in the mask. Then I used a very large brush for the Bloat tool and made the ears expand to fit the mask. You could also use the Push to the Left tool. It pushes to the left when you drag upward and to the right when you drag downward.

  4. The smirk on the dog's lips was made by dragging the Forward Warp tool to push up the ends of their mouths.




Digital Photography(c) Expert Techniques
Digital Photography Expert Techniques
ISBN: 0596526903
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2004
Pages: 124
Authors: Ken Milburn

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