The Warp Tool
Blake Rudis
Lessons
Bootcamp Introduction
16:22 2The Bridge Interface
13:33 3Setting up Bridge
06:55 4Overview of Bridge
11:29 5Practical Application of Bridge
27:56 6Introduction to Raw Editing
11:00 7Setting up ACR Preferences & Interface
07:39 8Global Tools Part 1
16:44Global Tools Part 2
20:01 10Local Tools
22:56 11Introduction to the Photoshop Interface
07:13 12Toolbars, Menus and Windows
25:07 13Setup and Interface
11:48 14Adobe Libraries
05:57 15Saving Files
07:39 16Introduction to Cropping
12:10 17Cropping for Composition in ACR
04:44 18Cropping for Composition in Photoshop
12:40 19Cropping for the Subject in Post
03:25 20Cropping for Print
07:34 21Perspective Cropping in Photoshop
07:11 22Introduction to Layers
08:42 23Vector & Raster Layers Basics
05:05 24Adjustment Layers in Photoshop
27:35 25Organizing and Managing Layers
15:35 26Introduction to Layer Tools and Blend Modes
21:34 27Screen and Multiply and Overlay
09:15 28Soft Light Blend Mode
07:34 29Color and Luminosity Blend Modes
12:47 30Color Burn and Color Dodge Blend Modes
07:43 31Introduction to Layer Styles
11:43 32Practical Application: Layer Tools
13:06 33Introduction to Masks and Brushes
04:43 34Brush Basics
09:22 35Custom Brushes
04:01 36Brush Mask: Vignettes
06:58 37Brush Mask: Curves Dodge & Burn
06:53 38Brush Mask: Hue & Saturation
07:52 39Mask Groups
05:52 40Clipping Masks
04:11 41Masking in Adobe Camera Raw
07:06 42Practical Applications: Masks
14:03 43Introduction to Selections
05:42 44Basic Selection Tools
17:41 45The Pen Tool
11:56 46Masks from Selections
04:22 47Selecting Subjects and Masking
07:11 48Color Range Mask
17:35 49Luminosity Masks Basics
12:00 50Introduction to Cleanup Tools
07:02 51Adobe Camera Raw
10:16 52Healing and Spot Healing Brush
14:56 53The Clone Stamp Tool
10:20 54The Patch Tool
06:38 55Content Aware Move Tool
04:56 56Content Aware Fill
06:46 57Custom Cleanup Selections
15:42 58Introduction to Shapes and Text
13:46 59Text Basics
15:57 60Shape Basics
07:00 61Adding Text to Pictures
09:46 62Custom Water Marks
14:05 63Introduction to Smart Objects
04:37 64Smart Object Basics
09:13 65Smart Objects and Filters
09:05 66Smart Objects and Image Transformation
10:57 67Smart Objects and Album Layouts
11:40 68Smart Objects and Composites
10:47 69Introduction to Image Transforming
04:34 70ACR and Lens Correction
09:45 71Photoshop and Lens Correction
14:26 72The Warp Tool
11:16 73Perspective Transformations
20:33 74Introduction to Actions in Photoshop
09:27 75Introduction to the Actions Panel Interface
05:06 76Making Your First Action
03:49 77Modifying Actions After You Record Them
11:38 78Adding Stops to Actions
04:01 79Conditional Actions
07:36 80Actions that Communicate
25:26 81Introduction to Filters
04:38 82ACR as a Filter
09:20 83Helpful Artistic Filters
17:08 84Helpful Practical Filters
07:08 85Sharpening with Filters
07:32 86Rendering Trees
08:20 87The Oil Paint and Add Noise Filters
15:08 88Introduction to Editing Video
06:20 89Timeline for Video
08:15 90Cropping Video
03:34 91Adjustment Layers and Video
05:25 92Building Lookup Tables
07:00 93Layers, Masking Video & Working with Type
15:11 94ACR to Edit Video
06:10 95Animated Gifs
11:39 96Introduction to Creative Effects
06:08 97Black, White, and Monochrome
18:05 98Matte and Cinematic Effects
08:23 99Gradient Maps and Solid Color Grades
12:20 100Gradients
04:21 101Glow and Haze
10:23 102Introduction to Natural Retouching
05:33 103Brightening Teeth
10:25 104Clean Up with the Clone Stamp Tool
08:07 105Cleaning and Brightening Eyes
16:58 106Advanced Clean Up Techniques
24:47 107Introduction to Portrait Workflow & Bridge Organization
14:47 108ACR for Portraits Pre-Edits
21:27 109Portrait Workflow Techniques
18:46 110Introduction to Landscape Workflow & Bridge Organization
12:17 111Landscape Workflow Techniques
37:36 112Introduction to Compositing & Bridge
06:59 113Composite Workflow Techniques
34:01 114Landscape Composite Projects
24:14 115Bonus: Rothko and Workspace
05:15 116Bonus: Adding Textures to Photos
07:05 117Bonus: The Mask (Extras)
05:18 118Bonus: The Color Range Mask in ACR
04:54Lesson Info
The Warp Tool
What I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna show you how, practical application wise, you could be doing things with things like panoramas. And after you stitch a panorama sometimes you get some funky correction, some funky things that happen in the distortion that you can't fix with any of the automated things. So even something like adaptive wide angle is not gonna help you out very much here. These are instances where you're gonna have to do things manually and you have to go in manually. Now, one of the things I did not show when we talked about Adobe Camera Raw was I did not show how to do a panorama. So I'm gonna include that in this so that you can see what happens with something like one of my favorite things which is called a vertical panorama. So I'm gonna grab all of these and then I'm gonna go ahead and click on this, drag them into Photoshop so that they open up in Adobe Camera Raw. And this is what's called a vertical panorama. This is a panorama that you start basically from the...
floor and you take pictures all the way up to the ceiling. And to do this, you really wanna make sure that you're moving a third of the way into the frame every single time so that you're basically leaving about two thirds of that content as fresh content with each time you're going up. So what you can see here is this is shooting some benches. I love doing this in churches, especially old, gothic churches, you could create some of the most amazing images from those churches. So we'll start at the benches here, click here and I see that I went from basically shooting from the pews up a little bit and then up a little bit more and then up a little bit more until I reached the ceiling. Now when you're building panoramas, it's always good to have at least anywhere from one third to half of that frame being fresh every single time. Some people might tell you 10-20% but if you really wanna give Photoshop or Adobe Camera Raw a break, you give it a little bit more information than 10% or 20% when you're adding in your panoramas. The difference between this panorama and let's say a horizontal panorama is that a horizontal panorama you might tilt your camera vertically and shoot this way. Whereas this, you keep your camera horizontal to shoot vertical. And you can take anywhere from five to seven to 10 different images to do this. What we're gonna do is we're gonna grab the bottom, grab the top, press and hold shift, and then we're gonna go into right here there's a little dropdown icon. Say merge to panorama. It might give you a little error that says it's not able to automatically select a valid lens profile. If you wanna continue it's kinda up to you. Just go ahead and press OK, that does happen every once in a while. And it's gonna start building a panoramic preview for you of this. Now what it's doing with this is it's taking all of your image and it's doing a lot of the manual, it's doing a lot of that transformation for you and it's doing it manually to put all of those different images together and stitch them together. Now we have a couple different selections here. We have spherical, we have cylindrical, and we have perspective. Sometimes perspective won't necessarily work, especially if we're doing something like this, so I tend to stay within either spherical or cylindrical. I like the cylindrical look. If we go ahead and move the boundary warp over to the right, you can start to see all the area that it's cutting off on the sides. That's where Adobe Camera Raw's gonna automatically start filling those spots in so you get a bigger image. Because if we just leave this like this, it's gonna be a really skinny photograph and it's not gonna be a very compelling panorama. So if we move this over to about right there, that looks much better. A little bit of a wider format. Press merge. So it's doing a lot of that stuff for you, all the manually filling in of all the stuff on the sides that when we clicked on the extra stuff it's filling in those sides for you when you do that boundary warp. But it's gonna need to save this as its own file so it wants you to save it as a DNG file so you're basically creating your own digital negative from a series of four negatives. And you go ahead and press save. And there it will build that preview for you of what that image looks like and that's the stitched version of all of these images here. Now there's a lot of its own perspective warping going on, there's a lot of stuff that's happening, all the stuff that we've already talked about. Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw working together trying to stitch all that stuff together but it's not always gonna be perfect. So typically with these, I'm even on a tripod, I'm tripod mounted. I've got it restricted so that my camera can only move up and down. Even though I've got it restricted so my camera can only move up and down, what I'm doing there is I'm trying to make sure that I'm causing any of that warping to happen as I'm building the images for this panorama. But what you can see across the top is that we still have this side and this side are not exactly perfect even though I went through and I did it really tediously to try and make it perfect. So with this set as a DNG, we can go ahead and just set the settings to auto just to get us into Photoshop here and I'll press open image. Once I open this up in Photoshop, I want to warp it in a way that it's a custom warp, essentially, we're not doing the lens corrections 'cause the lens corrections won't work here. 'Cause what's happening is this side of the image is being pulled in this way more so than this side of the image is. So there's another kind of warping tool that we have here that doesn't do anything automatically for you. It's not a lens correction, it's not an adaptive wide angle. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna press control and space bar and zoom out a little bit by going to the left. And I'm gonna go into a tool that's called the warp tool. So I'm gonna go to edit, I'm gonna go to transform, and I'm gonna go to warp. So when I look at this, the way warp works, it looks like your typical, when you press command or control T and you transform your image that way, doesn't it? We've already done a lot of transformation by the way, that's one thing I didn't miss to say. When we were working with shapes and text and any time I press the command or control T that's getting me into some form of transformation, which is typically gonna be a freeform transformation. This looks and appears like it would be a freeform transformation 'cause we get the same grid lines and we get the same handles on the sides. The difference between this is that we have these little individual handles that appear inside the line from one handle at the top to the handle at the bottom. And what these are is these are like perspective warping or custom warping I should say paddles that when you pull them to the left, it will pull the image in just in that one spot but also look at what's happening in the rest of the image, and manipulate it around it or pull it to the right. So when you pull those out from the sides, it's gonna make your image wider, it's basically gonna pull the whole thing and warp it out to the right hand side. If we were to grab the top, again, pull it up or pull it down. It's gonna do some weird things if you pull it down and you commit to that so I wouldn't do that. Command or control Z will automatically reset those. Ctrl+alt+Z will reset the one on the right hand side. If you grab a corner and move a corner at this point, notice how it's not moving like the regular free transform did. The free transform, if we grabbed that corner and we moved it in, it would do some time of perspective transform or maybe make that image smaller. If we were pressing shift and alt it would center it down from, it would shrink it from the center. So if I click this and move this over to here, you can start to see what I'm doing is I'm grabbing the edge of the inside of that archway and pushing it up to the edge of the image. And you can guess what I'm gonna do on the other side, grab this one and do the same thing right to about there, right about there. I might even grab this one and go a little bit further over so that I get those lines right there to match up perfectly. Now what happens in the center of the warp is if you grab in the center of the warp and you move it around, it will warp the image from the center. Something like that or bow it out. So you can see here this is not like any of the lens corrections that we've looked at in the past because those lens corrections that we looked at in the past will allow us to basically move equally as we change that barrel distortion. This does not let you move equally as you move that distortion. If I move this on this side of the image, it's just moving it on the side of the image, it's not creating that kind of barrel warp that we would create if we were using something like a lens correction tool that has that barrel distortion fix that we saw before. So that would be, I wouldn't wanna do this to this image, I'm just showing you what happens if you click from the inside of that. And it's hard to get it back once you make that decision, you're kinda stuck with it, it's hard to get it back to where it was before. So it's something we definitely would not wanna do with this photograph. So I'm gonna go ahead and exit out of here and if we press escape it will not commit it. Again, if you wanted to go back to it you go to edit, transform, and then warp. And again, I'll just grab this in the upper right hand corner, get that warped right to about there. I like the way that looked right there. And then warp that over to there. So then if we take a look at the photograph though, if we actually like zoom in here and look at what's happening within the image, it doesn't look like much has really changed. But all we've done is because we have a lot of symmetry here is we've just made that a little bit more symmetrical. These vertical panoramas are a lot of fun. I highly suggest that if you're gonna be doing these you definitely do them when you're tripod mounted. Move from the bottom, work your to the top. Give yourself between 30 to 50% extra space between images so that it makes Photoshop a little bit, gives it a little bit more room to work with. But they do create a very warping perspective in themselves. So what a vertical panorama is it's not really natural anyway so it's gonna have this kind of warping, kind of bowing thing going on there. If you're in something like the Notre Dame, it can really make that thing look awesome with all the gothic architecture just forcing you right into the center of the image. It's just a really nice artistic kind of panorama to do that's different than the traditional okay, move left to move right. This is a vertical panorama, it creates some really interesting things inside churches.
Class Materials
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
Amazing course, but don't be fooled into thinking this is a beginner's course for photographers. The problem isn't Blake's explanations; they're top. The problem is the vast scope of this course and the order in which the topics are presented. Take layers for example. When I was first learning Photoshop (back when we learned from books), I found I learned little or nothing from, for example, books that covered layers before they covered how to improve/process photographs. These books taught me how to organize, move, and link layers before they showed me what a layer was actually for. Those books tended to teach me everything there is to know about layers (types of layers, how to organize them, how to move them, how to move them two at a time, how to move them two at a time even if there are other layers between the two you're interested in, useful troubleshooting tips, etc. ) all before I even know (from a photographer's point of view) what it is the things actually do. The examples of organizing, linking, and moving mean everything for graphic designers from Day One, but for photographers not so much. Blake does the same thing as those books. Topics he covers extremely early demand a lot of theoretical imagination for a photographer who doesn't already know quite a bit about what he is talking about. Learning about abstract things first and concrete things later only makes PS that much harder to understand. If you AREN'T a beginner, however, this course is amazing. I thought it would be like an Army Bootcamp, taking you from zero and building you into a fit, competent Photoshop grunt. Now I think it's more like Army Bootcamp for high school varsity jocks. It isn't going to take you from the beginning, but the amount you'll get out of it is nonetheless more than your brain can imagine. I've been using PS for years to improve my photographs, and even to create the odd artistic composite or two. The amount I've learned in the first week is amazing, and every day I learn something -- more like many things -- which I immediately implement to improve my productivity and/or widen the horizons of what I can achieve. If you ARE a photographer who's a Photoshop beginner, I'd take very seriously the advice Blake gives in the introduction: Watch one lesson, and practice the skills and principles you learn in that one lesson for two weeks. THEN watch the next lesson. You can't do that of course without buying the course, so it's up to you to decide whether you'd like to learn Photoshop and master Photoshop all from the same course. Learning it first and mastering it later will cost more money, but I think you'll understand everything better and have a much more enjoyable ride in the process. As for me? I'm going to have to find the money to buy this course. There is simply way too much content in each lesson for me to try to take on all at once, but on the other hand I don't want to miss anything at all that he has to share.
Robert Andrews
Blake Rudis is the absolute best in teaching photoshop. His knowledge and how he presents the instruction is clear and concise - there is NO ONE BETTER. Yes, his classes require some basic skills, and maybe I'd organize the order of (or group) the classes in a different order, but, let me be clear - if anyone is to be successful or famous in the Photoshop world, it should be Blake Rudis. I strongly recommend his teaching. I started photography and post processing in 2018, and because of this class, I'm know what Im doing. The energy you get when you create something beautiful is profound, it makes you bounce out of bed (at 4AM) like a 5 year old, to go create. It's a great ride! Thanks Blake, & Thanks Creative live.
Esther Gambrell
WOW!!! I've been purchasing CL classes for several years now and have watched HOURS of "How-To Photoshop" classes, but this is the first one I've actually purchased because of the AWESOME BONUS content!!! SERIOUSLY??!!?!? A PLUG-IN??? But not only that, Blake is SO easy to understand, and he breaks down concepts in different ways to connect with different people's learning styles. I REALLY appreciated this approach because I am a LEFT-BRAINED creative that has an engineering background, so I really connected to what Blake was saying. THANK YOU FOR THAT! There are TONS of Photoshop courses out there, but I found this one to be the most helpful in they way Blake teaches concepts so that you know WHY you're doing what your doing. I feel like he taught me how to fish with Photoshop to feed me for a lifetime instead of just giving me a fish to feed me for one day. This is the BEST overall PS course out there!!! Thank you!!!!