Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, my name is Erin. In this tutorial, I'm gonna show you how to take a photograph and manipulate it using the liquefy tool to make a really fun caricature.
2. Finding a Photo to Use: Alright, so now I've gone over to pixels and I've searched, and I found this photographer here, Andre. I'm not gonna even try to pronounce his last name has a number of really excellent caricature style photographs that I think are perfect for this, for this project. So I'm gonna include the one that I am using here in the project. But if not, pop went over to pixels, the Checkout is work, maybe leave a donation if you like. And, you know, and grab something that you find interesting. Okay, so I'm going to jump right into Photoshop now.
3. Removing the Background: Here we are in Photoshop and this is the photo that I have selected. The first step, we're going to duplicate this background image year and our Layers panel. I'm just going to click on that and hit Command J. Control j if you are on a PC. So I am going to make another duplicate. I'm going to duplicate that again because first thing I'm gonna do is remove the figure from the background and then I'm going to clean up the back ground. Okay, so first image, I'm going to turn that off. That top layer. Second layer, I'm going to call back ground. And just to make distinguish it from the Photoshop back ground or the back EPI image. And this isn't going to be a perfect selection, but it will get the job done. Alright, so I've selected to subject, and now I am going to go, go, go on up to select and modify and expand the selection that way, it's not so close to the edges so we don't get so much gray. So, but I'm gonna expand that selection. Let's try 40 pixels and see what that does to it. All right, so that kicked it out quite a bit, but that's still not enough. I'm gonna go some more modify, expand. Let's try a 100 pixels. So total 140. I'm just trying to get a well away from that edge. So now when I remove her, this should be a lot easier. So I'm just going to go back to Edit, Fill. And I'm just gonna go with the old fashion way continent where and see how well that does. There we go. Perfect. Alright, so select, de-select. Now we're gonna go to the top layer and I'm gonna go, and I'm going to label this top layer face. Alright, so now I need to remove the background for this because we're going to start distorting this image. And I don't want it to get in the way with the background, so we need to remove that image. So I'm gonna go to select Subject and give it a chance to select. And then I'm going to make that a Layer Mask. Alright? I, and I'm just gonna go in here and clean up that edge a little bit by going to select and mask. And then I'm going to use this tool right here, the Refine Edge tool brush. And I'm just going to go over those edges. Again. This is something that I'm not, I don't want need this to be perfect. I just want to clear out some of that hair, make the hair look more natural. And I'm not going in too deep because I don't want the hair to get a bit too faded. Okay. Just a little. Now I'm going to hit OK. And then once we bet we're back out, the fun begins. Alright, the first thing I'm gonna do is apply this layer met. So I'm gonna right-click here on this Layer Mask and apply Layer Mask.
4. Liquify Filter Tools: Now I'm gonna go filter liquefy. And if you see this liquefy right here, this is because I've done it again, and this is where the filter that you've used last, it will be repeated. And I don't want to repeat it because it's going to apply a weird filter that I've done before or it's something that doesn't fit this image. So I'm gonna come down here and choose liquefy. And it's gonna take us to this new dialog box. Let me make sure this fits on my screen. And there's several tools that we're going to be using here. The one that I like most is this Forward Warp tool. You'll also see this reconstruct tool, which that will put it back to the way you started. And there's a smooth tool, the twirl clockwise tool, the pucker tool, and the bloat tool. Those are the ones that that I'm going to be using. Here's a freeze mask tool and then the thermal mass tool. I'll, I'll explain those in a little. But the main ones, we're gonna use these up here at the top. Okay, so in order to start moving this around, we can start pushing things around. So you can see here, I can lift these eyebrows. Have a little from there. I can make a larger brush. I'm just using my bracket keys or I can go over here to the properties off to the right. And I can just start raising those up. As you can see, this looks a little bumpy right there. So I'm going to use that smooth tool to see if I can fix, fix that. And I'm just going to brush over that. And you can see it's smoothing that line out nicely. But I think this looks excellent already. I could stop right here. This is the pucker tool. And I'm going to hold on a nose. And you can see it's doing the job. Owner knows. This is the bloat tool. Make the bread the size larger. Again, I can come here or I can use the bracket, I can use the bracket keys. Alright, and I'm just going to hold. And you can see it's doing a really nice job. And say, if I go too far, I can come back here to the reconstruct tool, make that little bigger. I don't know if this is going to work too well, but I'm just going to brush lightly on it and you can see it's bringing it back down to size. Alrighty. So what else have we got in here? There is the push left tool. I'll make that. You see, it's just pushing off to the side. I don't use it very much. The here is the frieze mask. So say I'm happy with these eyes. I can paint that in. And then if I come over here to say this to the Forward Warp tool, you can see out, push around in a distorts everything but those hold place. And I've just hitting Command Z to get back where it was. And then there is the thaw mask tool. So I'm enlarging that and you can see I can remove those. I'm going to scroll down here to the bottom. And right here it says restore all. And it puts everything back the way it was Now I'm going to click on this little face tool here, this little face icon there. And this is a wonderful little thing that if you're working on something and you don't, you're actually not after a caricature. I think this is great. So say you just want to make the person's eyes a little wider, bigger, smaller. You can make subtle changes with this so I can reduce the size of her eyes one at a time. All right. I can change her the height. The height of the eye, and reduce the size. Here we go, the eye with. And again, this is great for making really subtle changes. I can go with the nose, raised, the nose up, make it wider or smaller. But again, you can see these are subtle changes. So I think I don't typically use these if i'm going with a with something I've been serious about. So check this out. Mouth, I can raise the smile maker. Smile or not smile. Alright. And face shape. All right, let's try this forehead reduced the size of the forehead. This is just a wonderful chin. Just a wonderful tool if you want to do something, you know, in a more serious way. And I don't want to keep all of these phase changes. So I'm just right here. You can see face aware, liquefy. I'm going to just click the reset button and put all of those back to normal is twirl clockwise counterclockwise. This is something that I would never use it, but I taught a group of kids once I use this. And they just sat there watching this plane with this, like it was a mesmerizing toy. They would just click and hold and twist a person's face. And they just sit there like this for five minutes, just watching what happens. So as you can see, you can do some really interesting things here. I'm going to stop right there. I kind of like that. Alright, so from here, I'm going to hit undo, I'm going to hit restore all. And I'm going to do my caricature.
5. Creating a Caricature/Timelapse: So I'm just going to talk over this. This is me. I think I took about 15 minutes to do this caricature. And it's playing it about three times speed. And a couple of things, while few things I wanted to just talk about is how to do this. One of the problems I see with students who it's tempting to just use the bloat tool and pucker the eyes, shrink the nose. And, you know, and it's amusing. But it's not really thinking about how you developing the caricature. So what I want you to do when you begin working on your project is to think about traditional caricatures. Go on the Internet and search caricatures and see what they look like, look how they're exaggerating those features. Typically, when someone's doing a caricature, they will exaggerate certain features. And they're usually features that you tend to notice with the person. So with this person here, I was really drawn to her eyes. So I started with enlarging her eyes. And again, don't just be tempted to pucker the nose. I mean pucker the eyes and shrink the nose or just blow the nose up. Think about how you're shaping the face and develop the character, rather than just using a couple of quick changes with the tools that you have available. So think about how you develop in caricature, as opposed to just running the tools across certain parts of the body.
6. Final Tips: So I am done with this. And just one quick thing I want to show you right here over in the Properties panel near the bottom, you'll see this one little thing to say, show backdrop. So if you're doing something that needs to be very precise, you can always click on that and you can see the image below it. Alright, so here's the preview button. I'm just gonna click on that and hit before. And after. Quite a big difference. And this is probably taking me 15 minutes. Alright, I'm going to hit OK, and we'll see that up against our back ground. So we went from this to this.
7. The Project/Good Luck!: Alright, so I love this project. This is a lot of fun just to sit down with Photoshop, get used to the tools and have a little fun. And I hope that you'll do the same creating one of your own. You can use the photo that I have used for this one, or you can use something different. I would recommend you find a photo of your own. You can either go online and maybe find something interesting on pixels, or you can take your own picture that would be even more fun. If you have like a little brother or little sister, I think they'd love it if you try that. So snap a picture or find a picture and bring it into Photoshop and have some fun. And I'd love to see what you do and when you, when you finish it. So please upload it into the project Gallery. Thanks a lot, and I hope you found this helpful away.
Aaron Porter, Illustrator
