Hello everybody, Yanik here for Yanik’s Photo School. And I decided that today, we’re going to have a bit of fun. I want to show you a tool in Photoshop called liquify. It’ used a lot by fashion photographers to shrink peoples thighs down so that they look a little bit anorexic, make the eyes a little bit bigger, thin limbs and everything, but we’re going to be doing it in a different way.
We’re going to be having fun and a big laugh, at the expense of my friend here, Joey Laurence. If you don’t know who Joey Laurence is, he’s a professional photographer, a prodigy actually, I love the guy, he has a great technique, I invite you to read the interview I did on him and check out his portfolio, you’ll be amazed. And this photo, actually, that I took is him with a wig and a wig as chest hair as well. He’s just a goofy guy. And we were doing a rock band shoot; I invite you to check out my rock band tutorial if you haven’t seen the lighting tutorial on that. And after that he wanted a few pictures just to goof around, and I figured well since we’re goofing around, let’s goof around with his face a little bit.
So let’s go straight to the liquify tool. You’ll find it in the top menu here under filter, and it’s the third one down called liquefy. Click on that, liquefy dialogue box appears, and we’ll be looking at three tools in the liquefy filter. The first one is called the forward warp tool. The second one is called the pucker tool. And the third one is the opposite of the pucker tool called the bloat tool. Now, once you click on the brushes, or one of the tools, you can modify the tool with the tool options box here.
The first one is pretty obvious is the brush size. The second one is the density of the brush. Basically, well let me show you instead of explaining it to you, it’s probably better, the density is high up close to a 100%, almost the whole brush size will affect what you do. You can see how it pushes and it’s almost a whole brush size here that affects it. If we bring it down, you’ll see that it’s just as more of the center of the brush that creates the effect. So I usually keep it around between 60 and a 100 depending on what I want to do. And the pressure of course, is just like if you’re using a Wacom tablet, and with a big pressure you affect the file pretty strongly with small pressure, you can see what it does, not too much. I usually keep mine depending on what I want to do in the 60’s. And we’ll see where that takes us.
Let me restore everything here. I’m zooming on Joey’s face. And the first thing we’re going to do, now the picture quality isn’t that great here because I reduced it since the liquify filter takes up a lot of juice on my cpu, and when I was doing it with a full resolution 12 mega pixel file, it was just stalling my system too much. So I want to go quickly through this with you. First thing we should do I think is give him a bit of a Michael Jackson nose how’s that? So we’ll use the pucker tool for that, and what the pucker tool does is that it shrinks, it puckers everything in it, brings everything back to a focal point in the middle. Let me reduce the brush size here a little bit. That’s about right. And let me just click and hold, if you click and hold you see how it’s shrinking there. We’re just going to shrink this whole nose down. And there you go, isn’t that a great Michael Jackson nose right there?
Now the next we’re going to do, we’re going to use the opposite tool called the bloat tool, right here. And we’re going to bring his eyes out because they’re a bit small there, so if we were a fashion photographer we’ll probably do this, but we’re not, we’re just going to bloat his eyes out completely. Making it look funny a little bit. Bring the eye brows up a little bit, so again it’s just click and hold. Bloat in place, and you can do this. And that looks pretty good actually.
And the next tool we’re going to use is the first one that I mentioned which is the top one, which is kind of like the smudge tool in Photoshop, called the forward warp tool. And what we’ll do, well he looks a bit serious here; let’s give him a bit of a smile here. Not bad, maybe a little bit more of a smile here. Hey looking good there Joey! Looking good! Now I think he needs a bit of chin surgery here, his face not that pointy enough. So let me increase the brush size a little bit, that’s a little too big. That’s not bad, and we’ll just stretch his chin down a little bit. Hey that looks more like Joey. I think he was wearing a mask before and this is what he actually really looks like, just kidding my friend.
All right, and this is how you would use the three tools in Photoshop to have fun, so I invite you to take pictures of your friends and family, try not to take pictures of people that can actually do you harm after. And try this tool out, and try all the three tools from the liquify filter. And if you want, you can post them in the flicker group, you’ll see the link at the bottom of this article. So, have fun and have a great weekend and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye-bye.
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