Manipulating with Puppet Warp
As I mentioned, Photoshop is famous, if not downright notorious,
for its ability to distort reality. But we’ve pretty much been limited
to Liquify and to the content-aware scaling added in CS4. However,
this current edition of Photoshop introduces us to puppet warp,
which allows you to assign points, known as pins, in an image and
then stretch or squish the geographic relationship of those pins to
effect distortion. This is easily the most entertaining new feature in
Photoshop CS5, and it’s powerful too. If you thought you couldn’t
believe your eyes before, just wait until you see puppet warp.
In this exercise, I’ll show you how to use puppet warp in one of
its most obvious ways, manipulating the limbs of a human model.
We’ll also use it in a slightly less obvious way, distorting individual
characters of type.
- Open an image. Open the
image Jump Puppet.psd, located
in the Lesson 08 folder inside
Lesson Files-PsCS5 1on1. This image, by
the photographer with the handle U.P.
Images, comes from Fotolia.com. As
you can see in Figure 8-22, it features an
obviously exuberant dude who’s clearly
just waiting to fulfill his destiny as a
human puppet. There’s also a text layer
imparting my personal directive to our
model, which will also become puppet
warp fodder before we’re finished with
this exercise.
- Select the subject. The first task at hand
is to move our would-be Pinocchio to
his own layer, so we can manipulate his
arms and legs independently of the sky
behind him. I’ve made it relatively easy
to do so. Click the tab for the Channels
panel, and you’ll see that I’ve created an
alpha channel in which the background
is black and the subject is white, meaning
that he’ll be selected. Ctrl-click (�-click)
the Mask channel to load it as a selec-
tion. Then switch to the Layers panel.
Figure 8-22.
276 Lesson 8: Transform and Distort
