Transcripts
1. Bend Objects with Puppet Warp in Photoshop - Introduction: Hello, I'm Helen Bradley. Welcome to this graphic design for lunch class bend objects using Puppet Warp in Adobe Photoshop. Graphic design for lunch is a series of classes that teach a range of tips and techniques for creating designs and for working in applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and Procreate. Today we're going to look at the Puppet Warp tool. Now this was introduced in Photoshop CS5. Anybody using CS5 or later can follow along with this video. Unfortunately, if you're using CS4 or earlier, that tool was not available. We're going to look at what things that you can do with the Puppet Warp tool, and also some issues surrounding actually using it in terms of preparing your image. As you're watching these videos, you'll see a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you're enjoying the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up and secondly, write in just a few words why you're enjoying the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. Now if you're ready let's get started bending objects in Photoshop using Puppet Warp.
2. Pt 1 Extract the Subject and Fill the Background: To get started with the Puppet Warp tool, you'll need an image. To make it a little bit easier for you to actually do this, you'll need an image that has a fairly clean background because the first thing that we need to do is to extract this person from the background. I'm going to use for a start, the Quick Selection tool because that's going to give me a good stuff over this person, so I'm just going to drag the tool over her until I get most of her selected. You'll see here that I've got the add to selection options selected. That means that every time I click on a part of her body, it's being added to the selection, not actually replacing it. Now I've got a few problems at this stage, it's a really good idea to start zooming in so that you can perfect your selection, and you can do that with a selection still in place. Just tap the Z key, and you can just drag and zoom in with your mouse. Now back to the Quick Select tool. If you use the Alt or Option key on a Mac as a modifier, you can remove areas from the selection, so I'm just going to start selecting the areas that have been selected that I don't want to have selected. At the same time, I can see here that part of her arm hasn't been selected, so I'm just going to drag the Quick Select tool over that area and just get photo shopped to have another look at that area and see if it can do a better job of the selection. You want to work with the Alt or Option key and just the regular Quick Select tool to work around adding and subtracting areas from the selection. Now there's a bit of a trick to getting these pink shoelaces on her shoe, which tend to be not easy to select with the Quick Select tool. With the selection still in place, I'm going to switch here to the Magic Wand tool. I'm going to set my tolerance to about 15, and I'm going to select contiguous at this stage, making sure that I have this add to selection option selected or else the Shift key enabled, that will allow me to click on the pink colors here in the shoe laces and add them to the selection. Anything that I want removed, I can just hold the Alt or Option key and click over the area that I want to remove. I'm just going to check her other shoe to make sure that I have those laces selected. Anytime you can go and switch back to the Quick Selection tool, just make sure that you're holding down Shift to add to the selection if you don't have this option "Add to selection" selected, and Alt or Option on the Mac with the Quick Select tool to remove from the selection. The selection is in place, I'm going to hold down the Control key Command on the Mac and press the number zero to zoom back out. Now there is a way of testing how your selection looks. Going to the last pallet here, what I'm going to do is take this selection out onto a new layer. I'm going to choose "Layer", "New", "Layer via cut", so I've cut her to a new lab. What I'm going to do is turn off her layer and just say if I've left anything behind and I can zoom in at this stage and just say that there is a little bit of cleaning up to do around her hand. I haven't got that very well and her hair as well. What I'm going to do is press Control and Alt, that's command an option on the Mac and tap the letter Z to put her back essentially because I want to keep working a little bit on this selection. You can test it and then undo what you just did and just continue working again. Making sure I'm on add to selection is going to bring in the missing digits here that I seem to have gone without. Now at this point to make sure I get her hair, I want to use the Refine Edge tool. In the most recent version of Photoshop you've got selected mask, but I'm going to use Refine Edge, so I'm going to select, and in earlier versions of Photoshop you'll see Refine Edge there, so just click on it. In later versions, hold the Shift key as you click Select and Mask, and that'll just get you the old Refine Edge tool. I just want to do this so that I'm only using one tool for everybody. However, that said, I have a class on selections which goes over in detail using the Refine Edge tool and the new Select and Mask tool. I'm going to give you a link to that class and the class project area, so if you haven't done that class, and if you want to know in a bit more detail what we're doing here, then take that class for making really good selections. Now I've got my selection here made on black. That's fine for now, I'm just going to click here on this Refine Radius tool. I'm going to adjust my brush size so it's about this size and I'm going to brush over where her hair wasn't a very good selection. You don't want to use this tool anywhere else but on her hair and also just here on her eyelashes because she actually does have some eyelashes that we seemed to have missed out on making a selection of, so just going to shrink my brush down little bit and just click over this area to get the eyelashes. But for the rest of it, don't play with the selection you've already got or you're going to destroy it. You'll select Output to selection from this list. We just wanted it as a selection and click "Okay". This gives us now a selection of a person that we can now use to remove her from the background. Again, we're going to choose "Layer", "New", "Layer via cut", and this time we should have less left behind. You'll see we haven't left behind her fingers this time and the hair is pretty well selected. At this point I'm going to concentrate on the background here, I'm going to make it into a regular layer. If just clicking the Lock Icon doesn't work for your version of Photoshop, double-click the layer and make it into just a regular layer. Now, I need to select the bit that I need to get rid of, so I'm going to use the Quick Selection tool and just select through the place where we removed the woman from the background. Now at some point your selection might take off on you, hopefully mine won't, but I have had problems with it taking off at this point. If it does start to take off on you, just press Control Z to undo it one step and switch tools. The best tool to use at this point if you've got most of the selection is probably the last Switch tool, make sure it's set to add to selection and then just lasso in the extra little bit that you need to make a selection around her body where we removed her from the background. Now this does not have to be accurate, but it does have to be at least the bit that you took out if not a bit more. At this point, we'll choose, select, and then modify and expand because we need to expand this selection even a little bit more. I'm going to choose 30 pixels and click "Okay". The reason for this is that we want to use the Content-Aware Fill to fill in the background and we want to make sure that we have selected everything we want to remove. Being a little bit enthusiastic is better than being too tight around the original selection. We'll choose edit, fill, choose content aware so that Photoshop is now going to fill this area here with content it sees around that area. Just click "Okay". When Photoshop is done, press Control day command, day on the Mac to day select the selection. Now we have a subject perfectly extracted from her background and we've got a nice clean background so that when we move parts of her body, we've got solid background behind her. In the next video we're going to go ahead with the Puppet Warp tool to warp her legs.
3. Pt 2 Warp with Puppet Warp: Having successfully removed our subject from the background, we're now ready to go ahead and to use the "Puppet Warp" tool. But before we do so we're going to take the layer that has our subject on it, and we're going to convert this for smart filters by choosing "Filter Convert for Smart Filters" and click "Okay." Alternatively, you could have right-clicked on the layer and chosen "Convert to Smart Object." Because a "Smart Object" and "Convert for Smart Filters" are exactly the same thing. What they do is they make this a "Smart Object Layer." Now it's not clear in Photoshop that the "Puppet Warp" tool is a tool that you can use on a smart object. Generally, you'll think in terms of the ones being on the filter option here as being those that you can use with smart object, but in fact, "Puppet Warp," you can. For the ability to undo the "Puppet Warp" features or tweak them if you want to, it's certainly very wise to make it a "Smart Object" before you go any further. We'll choose "Edit Now" and then "Puppet Warp." We're now in "Puppet Warp" mode and we have no help at all except that our mouse pointer has turned into a pin with a little plus sign beside it. Now at this point you may or may not see the mesh, but there is a mesh over your subject and it's the mesh that we're going to warp. There are three different types of meshes, there's a fewer points mesh and there is a more points mesh and you can't change them halfway through, but it's generally wise to settle for a mesh and stick with it. I'm going to just use the normal mesh. I'm going to turn off the mesh so that I can't see it because that's just getting in my face a bit. Now with the "Puppet Warp" tool, you've got the ability to pin things down, so let's just put a pin in her hand and see what happens when we move it. Well, nothing at this stage because there's nothing around which for us to rotate that joint. But if I put a pin in her elbow and now start to move her hand, you'll see that the hand and the body are all moving, but they're rotating around this pinned down point. These pins operate in two ways. Firstly, they allow you to fix a joint or fix some part of the objects so that it won't move, but you can also move using these pins. Depending on which pin I select to move, you can see that it's rotating around this other point. But let's pin down her shoulder and now let's go and move her arm. This time things are different because we've pinned to locations, less of her body is able to move when we move her hand. The trick with "Puppet Warp" is to put down enough pins to stop parts of her body moving that you don't want to move, but don't put so many pins in that when you start moving things, strange things happen like this. I'm just pressing "Control" or "Command C" on the Mac. I can delete this pin by pressing the "Alt" key option on the Mac as I hover over it and you'll see the little scissors and then I can just click to delete a pin. Now, you also saw that there was this circular thing up here. Well, if I click on a pin and hold the "Alt" or "Option" key, I can also get this circle and what that allows me to do is to rotate this pinpoint. Now for her hand, that might not be appropriate because it's having implications for the rest of her arm. But that is another option that you can use. Just be aware that both of those are controlled by the "Alt" or "Option" key, so you want to be careful that you're not deleting a point if you want to rotate it. Just look for the difference between the scissors which will delete the point and the circle here which is going to rotate it. For her leg, I want us to come down here and put in a PIN here. Now you'll see that right now my mouse pointer is an arrow, so you can just ignore that because as soon as we click, it's going to turn to a pin and we can just pin things down. I'm going to pin down her knee and her ankles, I'm going to pin down her mid thigh and also her hip area here. I don't want this part of her to move, but I do want to move her leg. I can move two pins at the same time by clicking on one to select it and then shift clicking on the other, and then both these pins are selected. Now I'm just going to move this limb. Now at this point, I'm just going to select on the tip of her foot and just move that so I can adjust that independently. You'll see that her thigh has got a somewhat unnatural bend in it. I think if I put a pin in the middle here, I'll be able to just straighten it up a little bit, but I've lost the shin bone here, so I might need to just work at that. Sometimes it's worth trying moving a limb before you actually go and put another pinpoint just in case that's going to work better for you. Once you are happy with the result that you've got, you can click the "Checkmark." This can also be an interim point should you wish, because this "Puppet Warp" option, because it's applied to this object as a smart object can be disabled and re-enabled. You can also double click on it to go back to where you were, the pins are all in place and you can go and further modify her should you wish to. You can add more pins or adjust the pins that you already have. You can continue to come back to the "Puppet Warp" at any stage and adjust it as often as you like or just double-click on it and then click the "Checkmark" when you're done. Now the mask that comes with the "Smart Filter," you probably won't even want, so if you don't want it, you're free to just delete it, that just cleans up your layers palette a little bit, but you can do that or not as you wish. Of course, you're going to want to save this file as a PSD file so that you save the layers and also this "Puppet Warp" on the smart object so that you can come back at a later date and make adjustments should you wish to do so.
4. Pt 3 Fine Tune with Liquify and Shadows: In this second example of using Puppet Warp tool, we're going to have to deal with the shadow situation once we've actually warped these pencils, I'm going to start by unlocking the background blur and I'm going to zoom in to the pencil area because I want to make a selection around these pencils. Possibly the best tool to do so is the polygonal lasso tool because that will allow me to draw straight lines. These pencils are basically straight lines. Was going to come up here to the tip of this pencil, hold down the space-bar as I just move the image into position where I can see it a little bit more clearly. I'm just going for the pencil, I'm going to leave the shadow behind. Having made this selection, I'm going to jump this pencil to its new layer with layer, new layer via cut. Now we're going to have to do each pencil separately because if they were both on the same layer, they would both bend at the same time. We don't want that to be the case. Let's just turn off the first pencil and let's focus on the second. Again, we're going to select that background layer again, I'm going to use the polygonal lasso tool. Generally when you're making selections, you will just want to have a look and say, what's the easiest tool to use. The more familiar you are with your selection tools and what they'll do, the easier it is to make a really quick and pretty nice selection. Now you can also further these selections if you want to, you can set a further value, maybe one or two pixels before you make your selection. But I'm not doing that today. Just layer, new layer via cut. Let's have a look and see what we've got left behind to see how good our selections were. Well, they were pretty good selections. With this layer, I'm going to make a selection around the area that I want to clean up. Now, I've done this previously and I know the shadows are going to cause me all problems. I'm actually going to make a pretty large selection around this area when I use the Content Aware fill, so edit, fill, content aware, click OK. Making a larger selection this time was way more successful than the one I did earlier so I Just be aware that sometimes with playing backgrounds and shadows, you might be better to make a larger selection than a smaller one. Yeah, these pencils look pretty good and each is on its own layer. Each layer needs to be created as a smart object with filter convert for smart filters or just right-click and choose Convert Smart Object. Let's bend the bottom one first. Edit Puppet Warp. Again, I'm going to put my pins in place. I want to anchor this end of the pencil and then start bending this around. Remembering that you can always rotate a point by holding the alt option key as you rotate it. Look, we all that good on this pencil and let's go and do the next one. Now, if you think that your pencil needs a little bit more work, a little bit more finessing once you've applied the Puppet Warp to it, you can also apply a liquefy filter to it. What I'm going to do is just get rid of this Smart Filter masks because I don't need those. Let's go to this top one here and let's just see how we'd use the liquefy tool on it. With the layer selected, I'm going to choose filter liquefy. Now the liquefy filter is the filter that traditionally as used, for example, reforming bodies, making people look skinnier or whatever. But we can use it to smooth out the effects of the Puppet Warp tool. What I'm going to do here is just select the forward warp tool, looking at the size of my brush, I can re-size it if I want to. Don't want it to be too small, but I do want to just start pushing in on the very edge of this pencil. You can use this tool to just round off areas if you've got like a little bit of a spiky thing as a result of using the Puppet Warp tool, you may find that the liquefy tool just gives you that little bit of control of fine detail in the shapes. I'm just going to push in here, see if I can push in on this inner edge of the pencil just to smooth it out and just click OK. If you have a look over here while I turn this on and off, this is the liquefy tool before, and this is with the liquefy applied. I'm just getting a slightly smoother effect and of course all of these are then editable because you can just select the filter, just double-click on the filter and you can edit the effect that you've applied. I'm just going to zoom in here and you've got a lot of tools her but generally the one that you want is this forward warp tool, which just lets you warp things in a forward direction. Effectively what you're doing is just grabbing part of it and pushing. I'm just going to try and straighten up this lead in this pencil while I'm here. Sometimes something that is a little bit too fine a detail to get with the Puppet Warp tool can be achieved using the liquefy tool. Lets have a look at this one, this is before we applied the liquefy tool to it, and this is after the liquefy tool. We've just got that little twist on the end of the pencil. Just be aware of that tool that you can use and of course, we double-click, we're going to be able to go back to the Puppet Warp and make adjustments. The liquefy adjustments may not make sense if you make adjustments to the tip of the pencil but when you come back out of the Puppet Warp tool, the liquefy adjustments are still there. Now in the original image, these pencils had shadows so let's go and see how we would deal with the shadows. I'm going to select the layer, I'm going to click on the fx icon and click to add a drop shadow. Now, my drop shadow is fairly intense here, so I'm just going to wind down it a little bit. I'm not using global line, I've got it coming in from this direction and I'm just going to adjust the size, which is going to soften it a little bit and the spread also, and click OK. Now we can apply that same drop shadow to this object here. Just again by selecting the layer, clicking the drop shadow and the adjustments are exactly what they were previously so I'll just click OK. Now the case of the pencils, when I adjusted them using the Puppet Warp tool, I stretch them so they would fit across the edge of the document here. Sometimes you may not have that happen where your pencils are actually over the edge of the document and so your shadows may fall short. If that happens, you can just right click on your Layer and choose Create Layer. What that does is it breaks the shadow onto its own separate layers so there's the shadow separate from the object itself, so you can move it around. With the selection tool, you can go to the drop shadow layer and the drop shadow that can then be moved around. You can reposition at, for example, of course, if you did that, you'd want to do that to both layers by separating the drop shadow from the original content layer and then just moving a drop shadow as you wish to do so. Now with any image like this where you've done a collage or you've been something, you're going to get some smoothing of the objects that you've bend. You can make this effect of stretching a little less obvious by adding some noise to the image. You generally do this to the entire image. I'm going to create a new layer, and I'm going to fill that layer with 50 percent gray. That is 128,128,128. The gray is my foreground color so I'll press Alt backspace option delete to fill allow with gray. I'm going to choose Filter noise, add Noise. I just want to add noise to this layer but I only want a little bit of noise. I want it to be uniform monochromatic noise so I'll click OK. Now I'm going to blend this in to the layers below using soft Light blend mode. Soft Light blend mode will knock out the 128,128,128 gray, so you won't see it, but you will see the increase in the noise. Let's just zoom into an area of the image and see the noise effect. This is without the noise and with the noise, it's just a little bit of graying in this pencil and that little bit of graying over the entire image will help blend it in. You're less likely to notice a smoothing effect where we've actually distorted the shapes.
5. Pt 4 Puppet Warp on Text and Shapes: It's also possible to use Puppet Warp on texts, or I'm just going create a new file, 1,000 pixels by 600 pixels RGB color mode. This has a white background, I'll just click okay. I'm going to text tool, I have selected Myriad Pro in a sort of boldface. I'm going type the word dream, in large characters and click the check mark. I'm going to convert this text object for smart filters with filter convert for smart filters and now we can go ahead and use the Puppet Warp by choosing edit and then Puppet Warp. Now in this instance, even though we've got a single text object here, each of these letters is going to be treated independently of the others. You can add points to the individual letters and rotate them in interesting ways. This is a little bit reminiscent of something like the touch-type tool in Illustrator. This is certainly not something that you can otherwise do in Photoshop. Now although these letters have a little bit of white around them at the moment, that's going to disappear as soon as we finish up with the Puppet Warp. Now we have exactly the same situation as we had previously. We have a removable Puppet Warp effect on our characters. We can select and remove this mask if you don't want to, you can just get rid of it just to clean up the last pallet. There is one got to though. It is perfectly possible to change this text, if you've made a spelling mistake, for example, you could change the text, but it's going to have some very unusual results with the Puppet Warp feature. Let's go and see what that is, I'm going to double-click on the text to get into the PSB file, which is the embedded text object. I'm going to select over the letter D and I'm going to replace it with the letter C, I'll click the check mark to confirm that change and now I'm just going to close this PSB file and click yes to saving it. The problem with this is that the characters are a little bit differently spaced out because I put that letter in to replace the letter D and it's thrown off the Puppet Warp. There's no getting out of this so by just double-clicking on the Puppet Warp, you'll see we've still got the ability to move these characters, but things aren't exactly the way that they were. The text has fractured and there isn't a way of getting that back. The short answer to can I change my type is yes you can if you don't mind that it fractures, but no, you can't if you want it to look the way that it did. But this is also an effect that's really perilously difficult to achieve in Photoshop this unreal fracturing of your text. If you're prepared to accept whatever it is that Photoshop gives you, you could type in a word, add the Puppet Warp feature to it, and then go and change the letters and just type this really interestingly fractured text as a design element, for example. But just be aware that while the individual letters can be warped in the first instance, changing the letters is going to break the warp feature. Of course, if we had arranged this so that each letter was on its own layer, then that would be different you would be able to apply the Puppet Warp to each letter individually and adding a new letter or changing a new letter wouldn't break the actual effect. Now just as you can warp text, you can also warp shapes. Let's go and select the customs shape tool, I have a crown shape that is shipped with Photoshop selected here. I have it set to shape and I'm just going to drag out my shape into my document. Now comes in as a new shape layer with that shape layer selected, I'll choose filter convert for smart filters and now we can go to our Puppet Warp tool. Now, I want to bring these points of the crown into different places so I'm going to select all four of these points. I'm just going to anchor down the bottom of the crown here. Now I can just drag these out to reshape my crown. Then when I'm done, I'll click the check mark and we now have this reshaped object again with its Puppet Warp effect applied to it and again, I can just get rid of that mask if I don't need it. That's how you can warp shapes using the Puppet Warp tool, also here in Photoshop.
6. Pt 5 Project and wrapup: Your project for this class will be to take an object and to warp it using the Puppet Warp Tool. For your own sake, make sure that you select something that has a nice clear background, so it's very easy for you to be able to extract your subject from the background and you can spend the time working with the Puppet Warp tool. If the object has shadows, you now know how to apply a shadow to your finished result. Post an image of your final warped object as your class project. I hope that you've enjoyed this class and that you've learned how to use the Puppet Warp tool in Photoshop CS5 and later. As you're watching these videos, you will have seen a prompt which lets you recommend this class to others. Please, if you enjoyed the class, do two things for me. Firstly, give it a thumbs up, and secondly, write just a few words about why you enjoyed the class. These recommendations help other students to say that this is a class that they too might enjoy and learn from. If you'd like to leave a comment or a question for me, please do so. I read and respond to all of your comments and questions, and I look at and respond to all of your class projects. My name's Helen Bradley. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of Graphic Design for Lunch, and I look forward to seeing you in an upcoming episode soon.
Helen Bradley, Graphic Design for Lunch™
