Puppet Warp in Photoshop

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Puppet Warp in Photoshop

Background

    Puppet Warp in Photoshop is an interesting "effect"  allowing you to stretch, turn or bend a part of your photo or the whole photo. However, you can only work it well with a subject that is not on a foundation or background. So you' would need to extract the item, work with it by itself, then plae it back on its original background or a new one.

A Pacific Sunfish caught and mounted on a West Coast British Colombia Fishing Resort  

As always, duplicate or re-name the file.

You never want to use your original image.

The Puppet Warp is under the "Content-Aware Scale"

However, it's light grey, meaning that you can't command this command.

You have 2 options:

1.  Duplicate a layer

2. Double-click on the right layer menu to unlock the background layer

 A background copy layer was created

 Creating the background copy layer, now allows for the Puppet Warp control to be activated.

Notice that the colour of the words  had changed from light grey to black.

With the tool activated,  you now have a "push pin" icon.

It's quite simple. 

You add push pins to hold a part of the photo, 

and place other pins on the opposite side. 

From the opposite side, you then change to the drag icon and pull.

You'lluse the top icon (arrow head icon with Iron Cross) to pull from 1 side.

Now you can see why I said that you have to work with an image without a background! 

1. The background layer is not moving, while the top layer is changing and rotating!

2. Look at the lower tail part of the fish. It's distorted. You have to be careful where you plave the push pin.

Notice the distortion of the fabric in back of the fish - ergo,you can only use an image without a background (one with the checkerboard).

I've flattened the image to save it, but notice that the misalignment of the 2 layers still persists!

 Here, I decided to attack the above problem of misaligned layers, buy working only with 1 layer.

I did everything as before, then  applied the Puppet Warp.

Since I only had to work with 1 layer, I didn't worry about the misalignment issue.

You can see the checkerboard in the background.

However, the front layer now can rotate without the worry of the background layer.

You can always crop away the excess undesirable areas.

I did a bit more warping to show you how you can distort the fish.

You can have many points, and even a map of warp points, but like all of my first 100 posts, 

I'll follow the KISS principle: "Keep It Simple Stupid". 

It's an expression that means to begin easy and elaborate later once you know what you're doing.

That's it for today.

I haven't been writing any posts lately, as I had the flu for 5 days, and the week before my wife was sick.

Lucky for me, I got my flu shot this season!

Have a great part of 

the day, wherever you are.

Stacey