Lessons

Lesson Info

Puppet Warp

Alight then there's a different way of distortion. and it's something known as puppet warping. And this is where if you ever have somebody that has their arms extended and you need to adjust their arms or fingers I find that this will be much more effective than doing liquify. The main thing you need to do is usually get the subject that you want to change onto its own layer. And whatever is behind the subject you'll need to have that on a separate layer. And you'll need to retouch the subject out of it. So let's do that before we get into this thing called puppet warping. I'm going to make a selection. In this case I'll use the quick selection tool and I'm just gonna paint in here. And hope we get a acceptable selection. After painting I'll type a letter Q which will go to quick mask mode although I see an area I need to touch up first. When I type the letter Q the area in red is what's not selected. The area that looks normal is selected and therefore I can look around the edge and s...

ee where it's inaccurate. I can type a letter Q to turn off quick mask and then come in here and modify it. If you need to take away from a selection hold on the option key out in windows. And so if I need to remove this top area, try to add the arm back in. You don't have to hold down any key at all to add when it comes to this particular tool. And I'm just trying to get this so I have a relatively accurate selection. In any portion that this tool isn't able to handle I might do manually. So I type the letter Q, I zoom up and I'm just going to grab my paintbrush tool and touch up a few areas because whatever it is we have selected is going to be on its own layer. And when we do puppet warping that's the only thing that'll be able to change. And I want to make sure that I'm not going to be warping some of the background or missing some of my subject. And so I'm just gonna try to make sure this selection is a relatively accurate. Paint with black up here. And unfortunately I don't have my glasses on so I can't see this as well. I do usually need glasses for working on the computer. So you see me doing an entire you know multi day class without them it's kind of funny. It's my excuse for being able to be a little bit sloppy. All right I'm gonna call that good enough for now. I'll type the letter Q to turn off quick mask and I want to get Karen on our own layer. And so to do that, many different ways of doing it but I usually type command J, control J and windows which means jump that to its own layer. You know if you have a selection active it only does it to the area selected. So command J if you look at my layers panel. Now if I hide the layer that's underneath that's what's on the top layer. And now what I need to do is turn off that top layer and remove Karen from the layer that's underneath. The reason I need to remove her is when we puppet warp I'm gonna be repositioning her legs and arms and everything. And if I move her leg up in her original leg is in the layer that's underneath it's going to end up having two copies of it. So here I'll use my... Well I have an accurate selection right up. Here here's a trick. You can select the contents of a layer where it selects everything it doesn't look like a checkerboard. The way you do it is you move your mouse on to the thumbnail image for a layer, one where you can see the checkerboard in there. You hold down the command key control in Windows and you click on it. And that's selected the entire contents of the layer but not the empty part. Not the checkerboard. So I got our selection back. I'm going to make that selection just a little less bit larger by choosing expand. Maybe I don't know about three pixels larger. And then I'm gonna tell Photoshop to retouch out what's there by choosing fill and using the setting called content-aware. And if it messes up I'll manually retouch parts of it. Now did pretty darn good job. The only thing I might do is grab the Spot Healing Brush. Retouch out some little pieces. That would be nice to get rid of that shadow but I think I'd do it afterwards. Once I know how her body position will be then it'd be easier to determine where things should go. Let's go to the layer that's on top. Let's turn it back on and let's turn it into a smart object. So whatever we do is not permanent. And now let's start puppet warping. To puppet warp you go to the Edit menu and there you'll find the choice of puppet work. Usually when you turn it on you're gonna see a mesh on top of your image. But I used this particular feature in our advanced retouching lesson. And I turned off a checkbox at the top right here called Show Mesh but by default that would be on. So it would look like this. It's not all that useful to look at that mesh. I mean if you zoom up you're welcome to inspect it but so at the top of my screen I'll turn off the show mesh checkbox. And now imagine that the layer we're working on is made out of clay or something that I could mold and just grab with my fingers and change. What I usually want to do is I want to click wherever a person would have a joint. So here she has a knee and so I would click there. That means that's going to become a pivot point. Something that could be moved. And if other things are moved that point will stay put. And so I'm come down here to her ankle and I could go to the tip of her foot. And then I'll go to the bottom of her leg maybe her toe. Go to her knee. You go right into here. And also adding these points makes it so if I don't make changes to certain things. These areas won't move without me manually clicking on them to reposition those areas. But one on the top of her head and I probably need one in here maybe at the end of her arm. Alright now I've anchored in the areas where I'm thinking I don't want these areas to move without me purposefully doing it. And let's start up here where Karen's head is. So I'm going to grab that dot that's on the top of her head and I'm just gonna start doing this and see if we can bend her head down. Now I might need separate control of certain areas maybe this back part of her head. I need to pull upward a little more like that. Maybe I need to grab her chin and get it to be pointed more downward and then reposition that one I had at the top now to get it to be just right. Maybe here I wanted Karen's leg to be pointed up. Well in order to do that. Here I have two points that would need to move. If I just move one of them it's gonna stretch like that. So I'm going to select one, hold down the shift key and click on the second one. And I'm gonna move it up like this. Maybe over like that. And then I only need to work on one of them, the one that's for the tip of her foot. So I'll click on it without shift and try to straighten that back out. This is sticking out too far so I'll add a dot there and try to pull it in. Maybe I don't want it here. Pull it in. Can adjust your position of the knee. Extend her leg a little bit. But you get the idea. Most of the time when I'm using this I'm doing very subtle changes. I'm moving a finger that was sticking out away from the hand. I'm snugging it into the hands like that. Taking a thumb that's being pronounced then I'm just kind of putting a bend to it to make it look better, less stiff. I'm not usually doing an entire leg changes but on occasion it's possible. Here maybe I'm gonna show how not to do a yoga pose so I end up having this bent too much or maybe it's supposed to be not locked out and so I'll make it look like it's locked out. Whatever I happen to need to do. But this is also very useful when you are putting together multiple images where maybe you have a group shot. You have ten people in the picture and two people couldn't show up to the photo shoot. You have to add them later. And you're trying to add them and make it look like their arm is around somebody but in the photograph you're starting with their hands just off a little bit. And so with puppet warping we can move that around. The other thing we can do with puppet warping is if we have an object we're trying to match. You have a tube of toothpaste and you're trying to put a new label on it. Well we can get the label in there in general but then to make the label undulate with the tube of toothpaste. Puppet warping could be used for that. When you're done you can press return or enter. And then as long as it was a smart object you can go back to the Edit menu and you can choose Puppet Warp again. And the pins should still be there and therefore you could come in and fine tune your results. I already read that. And you can fine tune your results as much as you'd like. And if you ever make an area overlap like this will look absolutely ridiculous. But let's see if I click on one of these pins I'll actually delete that one by hitting the Delete key. You can do things like this and then if that's the case there is a choice up here at the top of pin depth. And you can move it up or down with these little icons. So if I tell it to move it up I can get that to be on top or I can get it to be underneath. Not quite natural when it comes to legs like what I'm working on here but you could be working on other content where it would be appropriate. Maybe you're working on a advertisement for noodles and these are literal noodles you're trying to adjust in a bowl and one goes under another. Well that's what the pin depth does. Now I use puppet warping a lot when I'm doing retouching. If you... This is an example image where I ended up using puppet warping. If you look in this window you see some signs that are worn away but you see rectangular things that I wanted to retouch out. Well in order to retouch out those things we need to put in curtains. In the curtains I can't just copy what's here and move it down. It'll look like a repeat of that exact thing. But I could copy let's say this portion right here, move it down and then warp it so it might resemble more of the one that's to the left of it. So it feels like it's folding up against the corner of the window but just using it straight wouldn't quite look effective or appropriate. So in the same could be true here where I need certain pieces of these to keep going straight down but they should look like they randomly change kind of like they do above. And if you saw an exact copy of it down here wouldn't look appropriate. But with puppet warping I can bend it around to conform to whatever idea I'd like. I can even potentially copy from this side grabbing this nice straight piece because that's easy to warp when it starts straight. And maybe I can put it where it connects on right here. And I just get the angle to be appropriate and then warp it so that it might slowly bend just like it's slowly bending above to put it in. I'm not going to spend the time to do that here because we have a separate session on advanced retouching and that's when I actually used puppet warping in a similar context where I needed to take something similar to... well it was fabric, had a bunch of stripes in it that needed to use it somewhere else but it didn't match the surroundings so I had to use puppet warping to get it to work. Therefore if you watched that lesson you would have more of a step-by-step on how that would be done.