Lessons

Lesson Info

Liquify

Well then let's look at ways of distorting a face. And, as always, I'm going to convert this to a smart object first so that whatever I do to it will not be permanent and I can easily make changes later. Then I'm gonna go to the filter menu and I'm gonna find a choice in there called liquefy. If I choose liquefy, I can expand this out to make it kinda take over my screen, and on the right side of my screen are a bunch of settings and you can collapse each section down. The section I wanna start with is one called face aware liquefy. If I expand that, then we have subsections in here for the eyes, the nose, the mouse, mouse (laughs), the mouth, and the overall shape of the face. Well, if I come in here now, it will automatically recognize various features in here and you'll find that often times when people get their photos taken, one eye looks slightly bigger than the other. And so here we have a choice called eye size and if I move the slider, you'll see that it is able to figure out ...

where my eyes are located and I can separately adjust the one that's on the left side of the photograph from the one that is on the right. And if there was an eye that was just the slightest bit smaller than the other, this is where I'd be able to adjust that. We also have eye height. If I bring that, you'll find the eye gets taller, or not as tall, and that's good if somebody is squinting. If they're squinting and you need them to open up their eyes, bringing up the eye height a little bit has the potential of doing that. We also have the eye width so we could widen it or make it skinnier, if that happened to need to be adjusted. And, we can also do a tilt, where it's gonna rotate the eye one direction or the other. So anytime you need to fine tune things for eyes, this is one way to do it. There is a choice called eye distance and that's gonna put the eyes further apart or closer together depending on what direction you go. Of course, it's easy to make somebody look really weird by moving the sliders dramatically in different directions. All right. Then, we come down here and we have the nose in here. We can adjust the height of the nose, either making it shorter or extending it, and we can also make the nose a bit wider or skinnier. I find that if I end up shooting with a wide angle lens, people's faces end up being distorted and that on occasion, I might need to bring the nose width in a little bit because the nose is something that'll be the closest to the camera and it'll usually be the most distorted, and so on occasion, bringing that in a little bit, if it was shot with a wide angle lens, can make the image look nicer. For mouth, we can attempt to put a smile in or its better for exaggerating a smile that's already existing. Or you could put a slight frown. You could adjust the upper lip height separately from the lower lip, 'cause sometimes people have them a little bit tensed and one might look smaller than the other. We also can do the width, wider or skinnier, and then the overall height. Finally, we have face shape. In here I can control the forehead, but since I have a hat on here, it's not gonna quite be appropriate. We can also adjust the chin height, up or down, and then the jaw line, how wide is it? And the overall face width. So that's face aware liquefy. Now if you happen to have a photograph that has more than one person in it, and you go to filter, liquefy, then you'll find and there's a little pop up menu at the top, and you can switch between various faces that are in here and adjust one separate from the other. So here, if I go to face number one, I might want to here adjust the forehead, bring it down a little bit, and then separately on face number two, maybe it's the mouth that needs some adjustment, that upper lip is a little tensed, so we might bring it up a little, and the mouth height, we might be able to try to open him a little, (laughs) although he looks like we can get him to talk a little. Maybe get him just a little more smiley. But the main thing is you are able to switch between the two. Then, if I close that, well and actually we can work on this one. This one I should've converted to a smart object first but I did not. But if I do it at this point, then whatever changes I had will be more or less permanent. But, I would've usually done this first. Then we can go back to liquefy. And liquefy then, also has manual tools. We don't have to use this face aware liquefy, we just have brush tool options here. And we have a set of brushes found on the left side of the screen, let's take a look at what a few of them do. The top most tool will allow you to just push things around and so if there is an area that needs to be adjusted like here his outfit is a little bit sticking out a little too much, might be able to bring it a little closer to the body. But then when I do that, the area here is a little too distorted, so the next tool down, if you hover over it, it'll tell you what it's called. It's the reconstruct tool. It allows you to bring areas back to the way they used to look. And so, if I paint here, I might be able to try to get the curvature of his suit to not be distorted as much. The more I paint on this, the closer it gets to the original version of the picture. And so therefore, it won't be distorting quite as much. We also have twirl tools, if you need to manually come in here and attempt to put, let's say a smile in somebody's face, well, you might need to decide exactly what portion of face needs to be rotated in order to accomplish that. In this case, I'm just gonna click and hold down just to see what direction it's going. It's rotating clockwise, so it might be this portion I need to rotate clockwise. So I can just click and let go a few times here to see if I can rotate that a bit. I'm not gonna go overboard though. And, if you just click, it's gonna go clockwise, if you hold down the Option key, it will go the opposite direction. And so therefore, I could attempt to rotate the edges a little bit. Then I could grab that top tool, which is just gonna move things in general and see about moving his mouth down just a little bit. Could grab the center of his upper lip and try to push it up just a little bit. Just to get a different look. We have other tools in here. This one here is the pucker tool, which will pull things in, like that. And it could be that in some areas, maybe his forehead, I just need to pull it in a teeny bit to make it look, I even went a little too far there. Or below that, we have the bloat tool, which is going to push things outward. And so if somebody is squinting their eyes and one eye is squinted more than the other and those tools on the right side didn't work, here I can click a few times, get that, whoops a little too far with that last click. Right now his teeth look like they're sticking out a bit, I could pucker them, meaning pull them inward. But there's all sorts of adjustments we could do there. And if I remember correctly, both the pucker and the bloat tools, if you hold down the Option key, you get the opposite, meaning it's the equivalent to switching between those two tools. Then we have a tool that pushes things to the left is what it's called the push left tool. If I come in here and I drag vertically and I drag up, do you see how it's pushing to the left? Choose undo. If I drag down though, it's gonna push the other direction. So on occasion, if you have somebody where they're sticking out a little too much, you can just drag downward the tiniest bit to push it towards the right. Or drag upward, if I'm on this side, push it in a little. Just be subtle about it, don't move too much. And we could come in here and try to resculpt areas. And if you need to push up or down, then instead, what you need to do is drag left and right instead of up and down. Here if I were to drag left, I'm gonna pull up, I'm sorry I was dragging left to right, and if I go the opposite direction, I'll push down. Then below that, we have freeze and thaw tools. Freeze and thaw allow you to prevent an area from changing. So let's just say that in here, I did not wanna change his mouth, and therefore, I grab the freeze tool and I paint. I get a red overlay over an area that's gonna be frozen and that's gonna mean I cannot change that area because maybe it was I was going to work on his nose and I was worried about if I was pushing his nose downward let's say, that I might get into his mouth area. So then I could come in and use any tool. I don't know what I need to do to his nose, but I'm gonna pull it down a little bit and when I do, this is preventing the mouth from changing because it's frozen. When you're done with that, you can go to the tool below and that's the thaw tool and I go over here and get rid of that red overlay. And so the red is an area that will not be changed. That's where if you have like a, somebody's in a bathroom and behind them is a tile wall and if you move the tile wall at all, it'd be obvious, so you go in there and freeze the entire wall so if you happen to start pushing and pulling on things the tile in the background does not end up getting distorted. And, then, we have a face tool. And the face tool allows you to do the same adjustments that we were using earlier, where we had our face aware liquefy but it allows you to do it by moving your mouse over the image. And so, if I move the mouse over the overall face, then I could click within it once I get near the edge and I can change its width, or I can come up to the eye and I can make it larger or smaller, but in the end, all I'm doing is changing the settings that were usually found under face aware liquefy. And, I'm just choosing a tool on the left side of my screen called face tool and it allows me to more interactively work with that. Then there is a choice up here, a tool we haven't used since the third one from the top, it's called the smooth tool and if you've ever done anything to the image, maybe you pushed on one area and pulled on another area and the result just looks like an abrupt transition, you could paint with this tool and it will smooth out any irreli-- can't even say the word, irregularity to it. So if you had an abrupt kind of non-smooth edge, it would make it feel much more smooth. Then each one of these tools over on the right side of your screen will have options. There you can change the size, the density, which is kind of think of it as how hard are you pushing with if it was your finger to move things around, and how quick changes are happening. Now, also in here, you're going to find choices like mask options, this has to do with the freezing and thawing. You could mask all, that'll put red everywhere. And then you could come in and choose the thaw option to say I only wanna work on this part. So now, nothing can change in the picture except for that area. That was by hitting the mask all button. There's an invert all button, which would change where what is frozen and you could also choose none to get rid of it. We also have options for viewing, if you wanna show guides and other things, you can look at that. They're relatively self explanatory. And also, there is a mesh option. You can save and load a mesh, meaning if you wanna make the same change to a different picture. Maybe I have five pictures of these guys taken one right after the other and they're all need the same choice or change, you'd be able to do that. And, then, let's see. Yeah I think that's most all the tools. So, I'll click OK here. And, liquefy can be great, I would turn things into a smart object first because then if you return to the liquefy filter, you can go back in and still reconstruct things by painting with the second brush that's from the top and so all the changes, they're not permanent, if it is on a smart object.