Adobe Photoshop CS5 One-on-One

And the hand-wringers will have even more to worry about with
Photoshop CS5 and its addition of puppet warp, which allows
for easy repositioning of specific parts of humans, inanimate
objects, and even text. When you can’t even trust the letters of
the alphabet to go undistorted, you know that anything goes.

The Shape of Things to Come

The tools in this lesson are ultimately concerned with reshaping.
You’ve already seen how the Transform command (obtained by
choosing Edit→Transform), allows you to change the propor-
tions or rotation of your image. But Transform can be used also
to skew and slant angles, in effect stretching and squishing the
content that is delineated by those angles, as in the top shape
in Figure 8-2. Items transformed this way are still more-or-less
recognizable even after the transformation is complete.

But the real stretching and squishing—not to mention outright
twirling and bending—power comes from three Photoshop
features that let you do much more than change the box that
bounds your content. With these tools, your images can be ma-
nipulated until even their own mothers don’t recognize them:

• The Liquify filter, accessed via Filter→Liquify, is not really
  a filter at all but an independent program that runs inside
  Photoshop. Liquify lets you brush with a variety of tools
  that distort an image in a multitude of ways. You can warp
  (as we did in the preceding lesson), pinch, bloat, and gener-
  ally push your pixels around inside Liquify, as I did to the
  letters in the second entry in Figure 8-2.


• Content-aware scaling (applied via Edit→Content-Aware
  Scale) allows you to stretch one part of an image (say, the
  background) while leaving other parts (like foreground ob-
  jects) unscathed, as in the third entry in the figure. Content-
  aware scaling is great for changing the relative scale of items
  in a composition without having to add a bunch of layers.


• New to Photoshop CS5, the Puppet Warp command (em-
  ployed by choosing Edit→Puppet Warp) lets you place pins
  in an image and then drag to change the distance between
  those pins, thus stretching, bending, and twisting specific
  areas. If you’ve ever wanted people or text to do your bid-
  ding, as I did to the letters in the last entry in Figure 8-2,
  puppet warp is what you’ve been waiting for.

Transform

Liquify

Content-Aware Scale

Puppet Warp

Figure 8-2.

The Shape of Things to Come 261