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Warp, Bend, Liquify

Lesson 16 from: Adobe Photoshop CC: The Complete Guide

Ben Willmore

Warp, Bend, Liquify

Lesson 16 from: Adobe Photoshop CC: The Complete Guide

Ben Willmore

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Lesson Info

16. Warp, Bend, Liquify

The ability to warp, bend, liquify your images is important when you want to place them on curved surfaces, add them to other photos and make them match a particular perspective.
Summary (Generated from Transcript)

The topic of this lesson is Adobe Photoshop CC: The Complete Guide: Warp, Bend, Liquify.

Q&A List:

  1. What are some of the advanced features covered in this lesson?

    The advanced features covered in this lesson include warping, blending, and liquifying images in Adobe Photoshop CC.

  2. How can you insert an object into a scene with a different perspective in Photoshop?

    You can use the warp and perspective tools in Photoshop to adjust the angle and perspective of an object to match the scene.

  3. How do you use the Perspective Warp feature in Photoshop?

    To use the Perspective Warp feature, you need to educate Photoshop about how perspective is affecting an object by placing rectangles on the object and adjusting them to match the perspective of the scene.

  4. Is there a tool in Photoshop to help with aligning objects to a grid?

    There is no specific tool for aligning objects to a grid, but you can create a perspective grid and use it as a reference to align objects.

  5. How can you bend an image to fit on a curved surface, such as a mug?

    You can use the Warp feature in Photoshop to bend and distort the image to fit the curved surface, and then use blending modes to make the image look like it is printed on the object.

  6. Is there a way to correct the posture of a person in a photo using Photoshop?

    Yes, you can use the Puppet Warp feature in Photoshop to adjust the position and shape of body parts in a photo to correct posture. The topic of the lesson is how to bend and warp objects using Photoshop.

Q&A:

  1. Why is it important to put an object on its own layer before moving it?

    Putting an object on its own layer allows you to move it without affecting other elements in the image.

  2. What should you consider when using the Puppet Warp tool?

    You should consider the background and ensure that there are no repeated shapes or areas that need to be retouched.

  3. What is the benefit of converting an object into a smart object before using Puppet Warp?

    Converting an object into a smart object allows you to fine-tune the adjustments made with Puppet Warp even after leaving the tool.

  4. What is the purpose of the Liquify filter?

    The Liquify filter allows you to manipulate and reshape objects in an image, such as adjusting facial features or body proportions.

  5. How does the Liquify filter work?

    By using different tools within the filter, such as pushing, reconstructing, rotating, and puckering, you can make subtle or dramatic changes to the image.

  6. What is the Face-Aware Liquify feature?

    The Face-Aware Liquify feature is a new addition to Photoshop that automatically detects faces in an image and allows you to make specific adjustments to facial features.

  7. How can you use the Puppet Warp tool to bend an object like a flag?

    You can use the Puppet Warp tool to create a gray scale image that describes the desired bending of the object. By using the Displace filter and applying the gray scale image as a displacement map, you can achieve the desired effect. The lesson focused on using the perspective grid tool in Photoshop to create a grid that helps in drawing objects with accurate perspective. The instructor explained how to find the vanishing point of an image and how to use the grid to draw lines that are parallel to the surface of the object. This technique is useful for creating realistic and accurate drawings in Photoshop.

Q&A:

  1. What is the purpose of using the perspective grid tool in Photoshop?

    The perspective grid tool helps in drawing objects with accurate perspective by creating a grid that aligns the lines of the object with the vanishing point.

  2. How do you find the vanishing point of an image?

    To find the vanishing point, you can use the Line Tool to draw a line along the bottom edge of the object and another line that is parallel to it, extending beyond the edge of the document. The point where these lines intersect is the vanishing point.

  3. How can the perspective grid be used to draw objects in Photoshop?

    Once the vanishing point is found, you can draw lines from the vanishing point and make them equally spaced on the grid. These lines can then be used as guidelines to draw objects with accurate perspective.

  4. Can the perspective grid be used for multiple surfaces in an image?

    Yes, the perspective grid can be used for multiple surfaces in an image. By finding the vanishing point for each surface and creating separate grids, you can accurately draw objects that align with different surfaces in the image.

  5. In what situations would the perspective grid be useful?

    The perspective grid is useful when drawing objects that require accurate perspective, such as architectural drawings or illustrations of objects in a scene. It can also be used for retouching purposes, when objects need to be placed on different surfaces and aligned with the perspective of the image.

Lesson Info

Warp, Bend, Liquify

We're back with Photoshop CC, the Ultimate Guide. And I want to take a look back at what we've done thus far because we've done quite a bit up until now. On the first week, we started with some essentials. We gave you a quick overview of Photoshop with how to think about the interface to start with. Then we jumped right into adjusting images with camera raw. Went into selections, layers, masks, good foundation. Then in the second week, we explored more adjustments and retouching. Now popping into the third week, we have our filters, masking, and we started getting into things a little bit more advanced. Well, now we're in Week four. Since we've covered that much ground, we can start getting into the more unique and different features that are found within Photoshop. And today, we're starting our last week together. And for our first session of the last week together, we're gonna get into warping, blending, and Liquifying. And so let's jump right into Photoshop and get started. Here I h...

ave an image. What I would like to do is I would like to insert something else into the scene. The problem is, if I were to take, let's say a car, and put it on the road here, I'd need to make sure I chose a car that was shot from a similar angle, wouldn't I, in order to make it look appropriate. Well, I don't have a picture that was shot at an appropriate angle so we're gonna have to use a car, it's actually a bus, that isn't shot from the right angle and somehow make it look as if it was at the right angle. So let's take a look at how to accomplish that. I'll go over to Bridge and here's the image I'm gonna use. Now if I just drag that over there, I think it might actually might be a little small but we'll find out. One way to open an image is just drag it onto Photoshop but I'll drag this over. It's a little small, I'll scale it up. Usually scaling up is not the most ideal but in this case, I need to be able to show you how to get it in there so we'll move it up, it'll be alright. And I'll move it over. Now if I simply remove the background on this, if you look at the angle, the surface, that the bus is positioned on and you look at the perspective of it and you compare it to this, it's not gonna quite look right. We'll find out though. Let's do a quick job of removing the background. And by the way, this used to be my home. I lived on this bus for seven, eight years. I don't remember how many years now but I have since sold it. I know, aw. But we're gonna make a quick selection. At the moment, I'm using the quick selection tool. I'm not gonna get my selection to be absolutely perfect because it just takes a little bit more time to do so and I'd rather concentrate our time on learning how to bend and Liquify things than how to select things because we had multiple sessions on how to do that. Now I can type letter Q to get quick mask mode. And I just touch this up a little bit because I see that the mirror on the bus is not selected, it's covered in red still, and it might be that I need to touch up the top but I can do that by getting a small brush. I'll click on one edge of the top of the bus, I'll hold shift, and I'll get the back edge because that's a straight line on the top of the bus so it's relatively easy to fix that. Just touch up a few other little areas. And it might be that I come in here and get just a little bit more tire, oops, get a little more tire. I'll press letter X to exchange my foreground and background colors. And I will say this is good enough once I get the bottom of the bus to disappear the ground. Alright, that's gonna be good enough for our purposes. And now I'm going to add a layer mask. So the layer mask will remove the background and now you get a sense that the angle just doesn't feel right, to me at least. It doesn't feel like three-dimensionally, it would be in the right position. So before I make any changes though, I'm gonna turn this into a smart object so that whatever I do is not permanent. It's something where, if I need to fine tune it later, I can go back in and it remembers exactly where I was in the process. Now I don't usually go to the layer menu to turn things into a smart object because it's just harder to find the choice. If you go to the Filter menu, Convert for Smart Filters does the exact same thing. It just converts your layer into a smart object. So if you watch my Layers panel, you'll find that that layer mask will get incorporated into the layer so it will only show me what it would look like if I did what's known as rasterize or render it. So you see the background looks like it's gone. If I were to actually double-click on that layer though, I'd still see the mask in there. I can still refine it later. Then I'm gonna go to the Edit menu and that's where I'm gonna find a choice we haven't used yet and it's called Perspective Warp. When I choose Perspective Warp, it will give me a little bit of guidance here. It's even animated to try to help me out in how you would work with this feature. Unfortunately, I personally find that the help is not detailed enough. So let's just close that and I'll show you how to use this feature. I'm gonna zoom up on what we have and I need to educate Photoshop about how perspective is affecting the bus right now. I'm gonna do that by coming out here and clicking. And when I click, I will get a rectangle like this. If I hit delete, I can get rid of it. If I click and drag, I can specify the size of that rectangle and I'm gonna get it close to the sides of the front of the bus. But right now, you notice that the rectangle is straight on. It isn't distorted by perspective at all. And I need to grab the corners here and get that rectangle to be distorted by perspective the same way that the bus is. So I'm gonna get this right on the corner of the bus up near the top and I'm gonna get it so that line that's going to cross the top of the bus right across here is parallel with anything else that would be parallel to the ground on the bus. So this vertical line here is parallel with the vertical corner of the bus. And I might extend out this a little bit because the edge of the bus actually goes out a little further at least at the bottom and I want to get that vertical line that's being created right here that is currently at the wrong angle, I need it to line up with whatever the vertical would be on the bus. And by doing so, I'm gonna educate Photoshop about how that particular surface is being distorted by perspective. I can grab the edges and pull them out. By grabbing the edges, it's not gonna change the angle, it just changes the area that this covers. And I think I'm relatively close as far as if you look at the grid that's in here. I might need to fine tune it a little bit because I do notice this one grid line here deviates from the horizontal lines on the bus. Anything that would be parallel to the ground on the bus, these lines should be parallel to and so when I see the ribbing on the front of the bus, that tells me I either need to bring this dot down to about there or bring the top dot up, depending on what's needed. But I think now we're getting close to having that match. Just fine tune until we get pretty darn close. Then, I can draw a second box. If I move my mouse far away and draw a box, the two won't be connected together. But if I move my mouse close to a box that's already there, then I might get it to snap. Do you see how the blue, there's a blue kind of guide showing up both on the grid that's already there and on mine? So when I let go, they become one, they connect to each other. That's only gonna happen if you start really close to the one that was already there. Then I can grab these corners and I'm gonna do the same thing. I'm gonna get the line at the top to line up at the top of the bus so it's at the same angle and I'm gonna get the line at the bottom so that all the horizontal grid lines within this are parallel to whatever would be parallel with the ground, on ground level. So I'm looking at the base of those dark black windows on the side of the bus. And do you see the line that's just above their edge? If I move this down too far, you see that the line doesn't line up with all the windows? If I bring it up right about here, it's starting to line up with those. And then I'm swinging this back and forth so that that vertical line at the back of the grid is parallel with whatever would be vertical on the back of the bus. Once I have that, I can again grab the edges and pull on them if I need to. Gotta be careful though when I pull down here. If I happen to pull down this far, do you see what happened to the front of the bus? This no longer lines up because it affected that corner as well. So if I wanted to do that, needed to, I'd need to fine tune this and bring this down just as low. And it's not important that it's right on the edge of the bus. It's important that the lines that are being created by these grids are parallel with the elements that would be parallel with the ground. And so I'm looking there to make sure those line up. Same with over here. So I think I'm doing okay. Now, if you look up here in the upper left, we were using this tool right here. That's gonna lay out our shapes where we define our various surfaces. Then, the next icon over is when we can actually change the image. And so it's trying to give us a little bit of help here telling us what to do but all it's telling us to do is move the pins and, sure, I'll do that. You only get that help, I believe, the first time you use this. Now watch what happens when I grab each pin and pull on it. Do you see how it can change the perspective of what we have? So what I want to do is possibly look at the scene that we have. And do you see this line that's here? And you see this line that's here? Well, I want to try to get this so it looks like it's using similar perspective to the building. I'll probably get the back of the bus to be relatively vertical because the verticals on the building are pretty straight. I wasn't tilted up or down when I shot the building. The front of the bus should probably have something similar where these are vertical as well. They're not at a weird angle, that type of thing. And then for the front of the bus, I could look at the building itself. Like, if you look at how these symbols, if you were to connect them together, the angle they would be at. Or if you look at this roof line and see its angle, I might want to somewhat mimic that. And the back of the bus though doesn't quite look right. I think I'm gonna have to pull it up that way. And you get the idea though that I can, you know, look, I can go, hey, (chuckles) all sorts of things, and I can set this up. Now later on, I'll show you how to create a perspective grid and if you create a perspective grid, then we can have a grid laying on top of our image that shows us what angles this should be at. And if I were to do that, then I wouldn't be guessing as much and kind of eyeballing it here. Instead, I'd have an actual grid. Just like when I was putting the grid on top of the bus and I was trying to get it so the lines were parallel with the parts of the bus, I'd be moving this until the edges of each side would be parallel with my perspective grid. But we'll do that once we're done with this and on a different image but it will give you an idea of how to accomplish it. And if I come in here, I can grab any one of these lines and manipulate as much as I want. Since I have a smart object, I can also return to this as many times as I want. I just press return or enter to say I'm done and then I will just go back up to the Edit menu, choose Perspective Warp a second time anytime in the future and I can fine tune it. If I didn't have a smart object though, I'd have to redefine those grids each time. But with a smart object, it remembers them. Was there a question, I thought I saw somebody. Well my question, I think you somewhat answered it by saying that we can actually put a grid on there if we're not able to eyeball the vertical and the horizontal lines. Is there any type of a tool besides the grid kind of like a level on a, the little bubble level that you would see on a tool? Is there something like that besides a grid that's available? Not that I can think of off the top of my head. As far as, we can do something like with a pencil. We can draw lines but we can't move those lines while we're in this particular feature and therefore it's not as useful to have. But once you learn how to create a perspective grid, you would just have a grid. You'd have a bunch of grid lines on screen and you'd just be moving these until they're parallel with those grid lines and it can be helpful. Here, I just moved the bus down a little bit so I could see this angle right here on the building. Do you see that angle? I was trying to make this somewhat parallel to it. And then do you see this angle on the building here? And so I was trying to make this parallel to it. Then I'd have to fine tune these sides to be sure I have them just right. When I'm done, I hit return or enter. And I if were to choose Undo, I've made two changes because I went in there twice. I'll show you what it looked like. I think that was the original and now I've kind of repositioned it and also warped it in a way that changed the perspectives slightly. So the thing about this is we can define as many of those surfaces as we need to but this only works good with rectangular boxes. So if you have something that has a curved edge, then it's, we don't have the tools to define a curve and it doesn't know how to distort that curve. So if you look at something like a building, like this building here, we could use it right on it. If I were to go here and convert it to a smart filter, choose Edit Perspective Warp, I could come in and define, and I'm not gonna do it precisely here because just for time's sake, but I could do this and then define another side like this and get this to be parallel with everything that's there but it's gonna have difficulties in some spots. Like in this section here, do I define it as this flat surface there or do I define it as the surface going the other direction? You know, those kinds of things. It's gonna be limited in how it can deal with this stuff. And if there's ever any curves or just openings in those surfaces, it won't be as readily useful. But I could do things like this. And then if I wished I would have shot this in a different way, I'll go to our next feature. I can tell it to make like all the verticals, take all the near vertical lines and actually make them vertical. So if I had tilted up or down in the building, it would suddenly snap those verticals. This either won't work or it will look really weird. I'm gonna tell it to snap the horizontals to make them perfectly horizontal. You see how it tried to straighten out the building? Or I can tell it to do both. And so that could be somewhat interesting to try to take something that was three-dimensional and flatten it out but it's looking a little odd here. I'll choose the undo. Most of the time, just doing the verticals could be useful in that. If I wished this would have looked a little differently, I could go over here and say, well, let's get that perspective to be different, which is really interesting to be able to do it but it does have limited use though because they're just rectangles. Alright, let's try other ways of bending and changing perspective and doing all that. So I believe we worked with this image in one of the other days but I did something without describing how to be good at it, which is I warped a picture so it bent around this mug, if my memory is correct. And I'd like to do that again but this time, I want to show you how to be precise about it and how to make it the most versatile. So I'll go to Bridge and I'm gonna drag the corner of Bridge over so I can still see my picture. And I'm just gonna choose a photograph to put onto the mug. I'll choose this one, drag it over and let go. When you drag and drop, this happens to be a raw file so it bring me to Camera Raw but if I click OK, when you drag and drop, it'll automatically start to bring you into the Transformation screen. So I'll bring that down until this is big enough where I'm just looking at the width and not looking at the bending. So right now, it goes beyond the edge of the mug so I'll bring it down until it would fit within the mug and get it positioned somewhere near where it should go. I'll press return or enter. Then we'll zoom up and let's see how we can get this to bend and somewhat conform to our mug. I think it might be easiest if I move the image so it's near the top edge of the mug and just that way, I can see how closely the top edge matches the curvature up here. And then later on, after I get it curved, I can just move the image down. But that way, at least I know it matches the curvature. That's not essential but it's useful to have. And what we'll do is, this is already a smart object because when I dragged it from Bridge over, it automatically converts it into a smart object. Had I copied and pasted or gotten it over here in any other way that didn't turn it into a smart object, I would convert it first. Then I'll go to the Edit menu and I find the choice called Puppet Warp. Puppet Warp is actually not what I'm gonna use here. We have many different kinds of warping. We have puppet warping, we have perspective warping. We want to just choose plain old warping. Isn't that interesting? Plain old warping is where we're just gonna get a handle on the corners of a rectangle and be able to move them. If normal warping is not enough, that's when we head into the other more specific kinds of warping. So let's do Warp. When I do that, I have a grid and right now there are handles on the four corners of my image. It might look like there's more than four handles, but there aren't. There are handles, or how should I say it? There are points on the four corners and coming out of them are these little handles. Those might look like points that are attached to the picture, but they're not. Those are connected to the little corner points, just so you know. So the only thing that matters right now, as far as what I'm moving, are the corner points. So I'm gonna move this corner straight up until it matches the edge of the mug. Then I'm gonna move the opposite corner straight up until it matches the edge of the mug. Then these handles determine what angle is the edge of the picture going to be bent to the moment it leaves this point. Is it going to go, for instance, upward like that? Is it gonna go downward like that? Should it go way over this way to begin with? You know, what should it do? And so if you look at the mug itself right where that point is, the first direction that you move in is kind of this way, isn't it? So that's the direction I want to get this handle is so it's pointing at the direction the image should move in the moment it leaves that point. Doesn't matter if it needs to deviate quite quickly after that. It's just right when it leaves, what direction should it start moving in? And so I'm guessing about that direction, looking at the edge of the mug. Then over here, I need it to leave at a little bit more steep of an angle. So if I had this go up, you see how the picture would go up first? Or go way over here first? Now I want it, if you look at the edge of the mug, to go about maybe around that angle is my guess. Then to control what happens between those two corners, I'm gonna grab, not these handles, but the edge of the picture itself. When I grab the edge of the picture, do you see how I can move it? And that's changing both the angle and the distance of those handles to control this. I just wanted to get them close to begin with. And now, I'm gonna be pulling that around until, I'll pretty much move my mouse up to the edge of the mug and then I'll kind of trace it back and forth. And somewhere in that, I should end up with where I'm really close to having it match. If it still doesn't match, it means I got these angles off a little bit and it could be I need this one the littlest bit higher. Then I'll come back and try again. Say that's starting to look relatively good. Now for the bottom edge of the mug, I can't move this down at the moment. I could press return or enter to say I'm done, which I'll do, and then move it down with the move tool to get it near the bottom of the mug, if I find that to be helpful, and then go back into warp again as if I never left. But I can't move it while I'm in warping, at least not that I think off the top of my. So now if I want to get the bottom edge, I'm gonna do the same thing. I'll pull out these little handles and I'm just thinking about what angle should it be leaving at the moment it leaves this point? And right now it's going straight to the right. I need it to go more like that. We'll do the same thing on the other side. Then I'll drag the middle to control what's happening in between. Sometimes when you try to grab the edge, it just won't let you. You're just a teeniest bit off, it needs you to be relatively precise. I'll pull it up just so I can see where the edge is and then I'll pull it back down to see if I can get it somewhat close. Now if I wanted to move it back up, you might think if you just click on it to move it, but you can't. Watch what happens if I click in the middle. So if I want to move it, I press return or enter to say I'm done, I use my move tool to move it back up so now I have it centered on my mug, and then I can go back in here to warp if I need to fine tune it again. You get the idea that you can use move tool to move it. So now I'm just going to fine tune the center. And if you grab it, you can see how you can move it way over like this, this, many different ways. What I'm mainly doing is trying to get the lines of the grid. I'm ignoring the picture because it doesn't have enough structure to it to make it obvious where it would be off so I'm trying to get the lines within that grid to be as close to precise as I can. When I'm done, I'll press return or enter. And then to make it look as if this is actually printed on the mug, because right now it just looks like it's obscuring your view of the mug, I'm gonna change the blending mode at the top of my Layers panel to a choice called Multiply. Multiply acts like ink so it's gonna print this on top of the mug. It will only darken the mug and I can get something like this. If that's too dark, I can either adjust the photograph or I could type command + J to duplicate the photograph and I could experiment with other blending modes. If you want to cycle through the blending modes, you can be in the move tool and if you hold down the shift key and use the arrows, actually not the arrows, the plus or minus keys in your keyboard, you could cycle through them. And so I might come in here and try some other modes but in essence, this image, I hadn't optimized before I put it in there. So I'm gonna throw away that copy and I'm just gonna double-click on the thumbnail for this layer. I don't know if you remember or not but it was a raw file and let's think about optimizing it. I might make it just a little bit brighter than usual. Click OK. I happen to have a what's called a snapshot built in there which allowed me to load in some settings I already had. But you can see how I've changed the look of the image and I can optimize it as much as I want. Now this still doesn't look like it's precisely aligned. I think this edge here is a little bit too low when I look at this. But that's great, I can go over here at anytime and choose Warp once again and just pull that side up if it needs to be the littlest bit higher and adjust its shape if need be. It's really nice because it's a smart object that it's never permanent. If I look at this angle here, it seems to be off from the vertical of the edge of the mug. Just head back in, Warp, it's not permanent. So I now try to get that so these sides are parallel. You know what would be best? It would be best if I didn't use a picture at all when I do this. Instead, what I could have done is I could have used a picture of a grid. If I use a picture of a grid and that's what I'm bending, it's much easier to tell when it's distorted. So if you want to know how to create a grid like this, what I'd suggest you do is the following. I would open a picture of the size that you would like to use. So if it's a raw file, figure out what size raw file it is or if it's a JPEG, whatever it is, just open it. Once you have it open, fill the document. Just go up to the Edit menu, you can choose Fill. One of your choices is to fill with white. So you just, you have a document of the same size of the picture you're planning to use. To make a grid relatively quickly, you can go to the View menu and there's a choice in here, I think it's under View, take me just a second. It's called New Guide Layout, New Guide Layout. New Guide Layout allows you to create a layout of guides. And so I'm gonna come in here and with the checkbox called Columns turned on, I can decide how many divisions do I want across the horizontal. Then I can turn on a checkbox called Rows and I'm just gonna bring that number up until they look like they're close to square. About there you think? Somewhere in there, they don't have to be perfectly square but as long as we're close. Then I want the grid to also be around the edge of the picture. And I notice in here, it's got a setting known as the Gutter. The Gutter is the gap in between the double guides at each intersection. And at the bottom I can turn on a setting called Margin. And if I do, I just want to make sure the same number is typed in. And right when I turned on Margin, it typed in that for me. So that now, if you look around the edge of the document, you'll see an extra guide on each side. So anyway, we got all that, I'm gonna click OK. Now if I were to use my selection tools, selections will snap to those grid lines. So if I hold shift to add to my selection, I can come in here and relatively quickly select all these areas. And then once I'm done, I will fill them with black. If I fill them with black, I should have a nice grid in here. Now there are many other ways of creating grids and I only used this way because I find next to nobody realizes that that feature is in there, the one that will create these guides and it can be rather useful. I'm holding shift the whole time here and that is making it so each time I click my mouse, it's adding to the selection that's already existing on screen and therefore I can get all these to add together. I could also instead use the, there's a line tool, it's part of the shape tool, and I could set it to the same width as these guides and just draw these out if I wanted to but I'm having fun making a selection like this because how often do you get to snap to this many guides? Once I have all these defined, I will need to get the bottom edge because I don't have that yet. And what's nice is if you use the same size image a lot of the time and if you shoot with the same camera, you probably have the same size image for everything, then you only need to create this once. You can just save this set of grids and use it anytime you want. It's not like you have to create it every time. Now I can choose Edit, Fill and I'm gonna fill with black. I can then go to the View menu and there's a choice called Clear Guides and now I have a nice grid. I can save that grid and now that's what I would use to bend around the mug when I'm first doing it. And therefore it's much easier to tell how is the entire thing being distorted. But you might be thinking, I don't want an end result that looks like a grid on a mug. Well, as long as whatever it is you bent on that mug is the same size as the actual picture you wanted on the mug and you turned it into a smart object before you did the bending, then all you need to do is go up here to the Layer menu, choose Smart Objects and there's a choice called Replace Contents. And if I choose Replace Contents, then I can attempt to find the image I'd like to use, double-click on it, and of course if it's a raw file, it'll come up in Camera Raw. Let's adjust this one first, there. I had a preset built in that had an adjustment. I'll click OK and as long as they're the same size, it should bend. And if I wanted to fine tune it, I could do the same thing. I could come in here and say Layer, Smart Objects, Replace Contents, and there's my spiffy little grid I made. And you can see how the center needs some more adjustment but you see how it'd be much easier to figure out when you're in this. And therefore, when you're fine tuning it, you could Warp, you can grab the grid lines that are here, kind of pull on them to attempt to get them out, up and down, however you'd like until you think you have the distortion compensated for. Then, Replace Contents, that's all you need, okay. So what's nice about that is you could create a bunch of templates. Let's say that you typically shoot high school sports. And for high school sports, you have a bunch of products you sell. You sell sports teams on a coffee mug, you sell them on a, I don't know what other products, a frisbee or something, whatever it is, and you just pre-make all of the templates using the grid. So you have it all set up and then anytime you want to show a particular team what their stuff would look like, all you're doing is saying Replace Contents and you're filling them with the pictures you've taken. And so you do the work once and then you can use it over and over and over again. So it can be nice. Might as well save this just in case we need it. In the class, of course, you get a little mug picture to practice on. And then if you want some homework, you got a book where you can bend your picture so that it fits on the page. But why not take your own books so you get some really interesting-looking ones with maybe with the really thick number of pages where it really bends a lot. Take a picture of it and then all you gotta do is replace the pages in the book and you can bend your photo for that. The thing you would need to do afterwards, if you completely replace the pages, is if there was already printing on the pages. Then we can't use Multiply mode to just say, make it look like it's printed, because then it would be the ink that's already on the sheet of paper with our picture printed on top of it. And so you either want to start with pages that are white or afterwards you're gonna have to add a little highlight and shadow in here. You can do that by painting with the paintbrushes at low opacity on top of your image. But you see that little highlight going across the page? We'd need to replicate that. Now let's look at yet another way of bending and distorting our images. In this case, I have a picture of my wife, Karen. And I take pictures of Karen doing yoga all over the world in really unique locations. We've done them on, geez, I don't know, I've probably done them on five different continents so far. If you want to see them, get on Instagram and search for TheWorldIsMyYogaMat, just all one word, that's our username on Instagram. And this is one that I shot last time I was in San Francisco with Karen. And usually when I'm taking these photographs, I'm yelling over to Karen to correct her posture. Move your left arm higher! Move you right arm, you know. But sometimes she can't hear me, there's traffic or something else and let's see how can I correct her posture after the fact. Now the first thing I would need to do, in this case, is we're gonna use a feature that we used in our Advanced Retouching lesson. If you happen to remember that lesson, I had some fabric that was striped. There were some baskets hanging on top of it, I retouched out one of the baskets by moving and doing what's called Puppet Warping. But in the process of doing that, I didn't show you how the same feature would be used if you need to do something like correct posture. So let's see what we can do. The first thing I want to do is get Karen onto her own layer and I want to fill the layer that's underneath so she's no longer on that layer. Therefore, we have clean background so if I move Karen's arm up or down, there's something behind it to take over that spot where her arm used to be. Now in this particular case, I'm gonna cheat because we're not talking about making selections. I'm gonna go to the Select menu and choose Load Selection and I hope I saved one in here. If I didn't save one in here, then I'll have to do it but I did. I have a selection called Karen. That won't magically be in your file so when you work on your own photographs but if you happen to work on this photograph, it will be to save you a little bit of time. All I did was I used the quick selection tool to select Karen. I went into Quick Mask mode, I had to touch up where the highlights were on the top edges of her arms because it didn't quite select that correctly so I painted. And then I went into the feature that is currently known as Select and Mask, it used to be called Refine Edge, and I painted just where Karen's hair was because that's where we had furry fuzzy or hairy stuff. And that's how this selection was created. But that description takes up a lot less time than actually doing the work so. This way, we can concentrate on what needs to be done. Now I'm going to turn this into a smart object. So I want to take just the area where Karen is and do it so I'm gonna type command + J, ctrl + J in Windows, which means jump to a new layer. Watch my Layers panel, command + J, you see Karen up there? Then I'll turn this into a smart object so that if I do any bending it's not permanent. But then I'm gonna hide that layer and I'm gonna work on what's underneath. Because right now, if I took the top layer and I moved her arms, you would see her old arms underneath on the layer below. I need to do something that makes it so the background is kind of clean so I have space to move things around without seeing like two arms. You want to see what I'm talking about, it's just like if I move Karen right now, do you see how there's another one right underneath? So that's gonna happen. I'll hide that top layer, work on what's underneath and I'm gonna come in here and just try to get rid of Karen. It doesn't have to be the best job in the world, I can always touch it up later. But right now, I am using the spot healing brush and I'm going to just try, probably would've been a little faster now that I think about it to just load the selection that I had a second ago. And if you load that selection, you could go up to the Select menu, you could choose Modify and there was a choice called Expand, which means make my selection larger. And then I could try using the feature that was called Content Aware Fill. I don't know if you remember that or not, but that's where you go to the Edit menu, you choose Fill, and you set it to Content Aware. That might have been a lot faster than this. Oh and right there, I didn't paint far enough beyond her face. So just a few little touch up spots. I'm not gonna make this perfect because I don't know which areas are gonna be visible out of this background but I will just do the blatant parts. If it doesn't want to do what I want there, I'll switch to the healing brush to force it to copy from where I want it to. So option + click right here and maybe about there. For now I'm gonna say close enough because I want to wait until I'm done moving Karen's arms to see what parts are actually gonna be visible. Don't want to spend too much time touching up something that Karen's gonna be covering up. Now I'm gonna switch to the layer that's on top. I'll turn its eyeball back on. So now we have a relatively clean background to work with and we have Karen. Next, I will go to the Edit menu and choose Puppet Warp. Now with Puppet Warp, it's going to start by putting a grid on top of my image and I can turn off that grid by clicking on this icon up here. Now on certain versions of Photoshop, if you have a larger screen, it might not look like this icon, it might be text that says something like Show Mesh. I think that might be what it says. And if you turn that off, you wouldn't see it. I find the mesh not to be that useful to look at. And at this point, I could go on top of my image and click. And if I click, I see a point. If I drag that point, you'll see how, in this case, it's moving the entire image because nothing else within the image has been held down, held in place. So I'm gonna first add some points. I'm gonna add one on the base of both feet to say, keep these right where they are. Now if I go back to the point I was trying to move earlier, we have two that are stuck, which is where her feet are, right, so they're staying in position and I can now move this. I'll choose undo. There are certain parts I didn't want to move though. I'm gonna click where her joints would be. I'm gonna click right there where her knee would be. I'll click right here where her hip would be. Maybe another one over here for her other hip. And let's just see what I can do. I could try to say, well, maybe I was supposed to put her in a completely different pose. Maybe she was supposed to be doing this. Put one right in her shoulder to try to control that separate, right in her shoulder to control it separate. So you think Karen does all these yoga poses all over the world? Hell no, she's just doing one pose and I do this, no, just kidding. Karen will be going, what! I'm like, she does the handbook for this. No, Karen does all the poses. I've never done this to one of Karen's poses ever. But here I shouldn't have added this right in the middle of her arm there. Ideally, I should move it, I should put it where her joints are because that's where things could like pivot around. And so I'm gonna click on that particular point, hit delete which will put it back but I'm gonna do it right here. And then I might move it up and then I could put another one right there if I needed to fine tune. But you see how you can easily go whoa, whoa, she's break dancing now, you know. You do have to be careful. It can look really nice to begin with but. So you get the idea that I could do a little bit of correction with this. Be careful though, you can also extend and, so you do have to visualize what would be appropriate and what's the limits of how far I can move things. But if her knee, you know, this front leg, I would usually say, Karen, move your knee forward a little to get your leg perfectly vertical in the front. And if she doesn't do that, I can either pull this a little bit but her leg's gonna start looking too long, or I could pull this that way and then, if I need her toe to come back up, I click where the toe is. So wherever I'm putting these points is where I can pivot things around. And so you want to put these points in not just where you want to move stuff but also where you want to anchor things to prevent them from moving. And so oftentimes, I'll put these in even though I have no plans on changing these because I just don't want some areas to be shifting around kind of randomly with that. But this is known as Puppet Warping, yep, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh. (chuckles) And it can be helpful for all sorts of things. We used it the other day with retouching. I had some fabric that had stripes in it and I moved that chunk of fabric somewhere else to an area that had wrinkles and, you know, things in the fabric and so I'm like, fine, I need to create those wrinkles somehow. So Puppet Warping is what I went to to do it. We have all sorts of options as to how to bend and warp things. This is just one of them. But I put her on her own layer and that was so that when I moved her, I didn't see her old arms still sitting behind there. Otherwise, I'd have two sets of arms, right? The original ones that would be on the layer below and then these. Now at this point, if that's what I actually wanted, I would zoom up and I'd start being critical of the background. And I would start thinking, where do I still need to touch up the background? There's a chance that right here, I think that might be, like this cable coming up here and it just looks like it's broken off there so I'd need to think, where would that cable come down and do I need to retouch that up? And just be critical of what's back there. Are there any repeated shapes, like these, that shouldn't be there or not? And if so, consider fixing them. But if you isolate the object first so that's all you have in the layer, and turn it into a smart object first, then whenever you come back here and choose Puppet Warp, then the dots will still be in those positions, you can fine tune them as much as you'd like. If it's not a smart object though, then when you go back in to do Puppet Warp a second time, there'd be no dots on there, you'd have to start over as far as adding them. We having fun yet? Oh we're nowhere near enough fun. So of course I'll open a picture of me. (chuckles) I'm gonna turn this into a smart object so that whatever I do is not permanent. And this time, we're gonna come in and use Liquify. Liquify is a filter, you'll find it under the Filter menu. And if you don't have the same version of Photoshop that I have, which was just introduced a couple days ago therefore a lot of you might not have updated your Photoshop yet and therefore you might not have this version, then there'll be some features in here that aren't available to you because one of the new features in the new version is in here. We'll get to it in a few minutes. And that's why when I first come in here, I see some white lines that are kind of indicating, look, there's a face here. Do you see those kind of bent lines on the left and the right? We'll get to those and if I happen to move over, hmm, why don't we get to those now because they look pretty interesting. Looks like it's doing a bunch of stuff. Well, if you happen to have a face in your picture and it's prominent, then Photoshop hopefully will find it. If your face is tilted a lot, I find that it sometimes can't find it. If it's like, if somebody's got they're head at a 45 degree angle, it might not get it. But if their head is relatively straight, relatively straight on to the camera, then it should be able to find it. And then watch what happens if I move my mouse in here. I'm going to first move it into this area where I see this outer ring. If I pull on the top, I could, imagine I didn't have a hat on, this would control how big my forehead is. Do I want my forehead to be more prominent or not? If I pulled here, you see the width of my head is changing, but when it does, look at my eyes. They're staying in the same spot. So I can come in there a little bit. I can come down here to the bottom and pull and this is gonna control how tall my chin is. This is controlling my cheeks, like my jawline. Do I want it to be prominent or do I want to pull it in? If I come up to my mouth, I can control my upper lip, although sometimes it's hard to grab. There, see how it's getting smaller or bigger? I can control my upper lip or my lower lip. Maybe my lower lip's too big so I bring it in. And I can even go over here and control the width. And then, wait for it, go out to this little outer edge and my smile. Now I'll do this to a greater extent than you probably should just to make it more obvious at what's happening. But if you're doing really subtle changes to this, making somebody's nose the tiniest bit smaller, making their eyes the tiniest bit bigger, that kind of stuff, it can be a fine thing to use. I just want to show you how it's done. And I'll zoom up a little bit so you can see it better. When I mouse over my nose, you'll see that there are three dots. If I grab the bottom one, I'm gonna control how long my nose is. And so I'll make my nose a little longer. And then if I grab one of these outer ones, I'll control the width of the nose. If I come up to the eyes, we have some choices and one of them controls how, oh geez, how large the eyes are. Another one controls how large they are in a different dimension. And then one of these, it might be the one out here, yeah, controls the tilt. I wish it had controls for that individually for each eye but to the best of my knowledge, it does both at the same time. Because sometimes, you know, one person's eyes is just the littlest bit more closed and smaller and so it'd be nice if I can control them separate but it doesn't seem to have that built in. Now what I'm doing the whole time I'm grabbing these various areas is I'm actually working with settings that are found over here. There's an area called Face-Aware Liquify and that's the new feature in this newly announced version of Photoshop. If I open it up, if there was more than one face in my image, here there's a pop-up menu where I'd be able to switch between various faces. So it can be nice when you're in a group shot and somebody just, their face looks a little bit on the odd side because you just didn't get the best expression at the moment it was done. Here it might recognize every person in a group shot and then just that one or two people in there that are looking just a little bit off, you come in and say, well, that one with the eyes are squinting a little, let's get their eyes opened up a little bit, that kind of stuff. And all the things that I was doing by pulling on the image, can be done by moving these sliders. So there's the overall size of the eye and then there's the eye height and width, the tilt, and oh, I didn't show you this, the distance between the eyes. Oh geez. Then if I could get the eyeball direction, I could just make myself cross-eyed but. Again, subtle changes usually, small amounts so that they're not so noticeable. Here I'm doing a whole bunch of them that wouldn't be necessary. And with the nose, we can do both the width and the height. With the mouth, we get the smile amount, upper lip, lower lip, the width and height, all that kind of stuff. But the main thing that's nice about this is that it's automatically detecting where these areas are so it simply saves you time. None of those things are things we couldn't have done in the past. It's just that we would have to choose the appropriate tool in here in order to accomplish it. So because of that, why don't we, I'm gonna reset this. There's just a Reset button over here. Why don't we talk about the tools that are over here and see what they do? So first the top tool is gonna push things around. So if I were to click on my eye and do this, I'm gonna be, imagine it's made out of, do you remember silly putty where you could take silly putty and push it on a newspaper and transfer what's on the newspaper then you could pull it? Not everybody in the world will know what silly putty is but imagine you printed your image on some pliable stuff that you could pull on. This is similar. It's very easy to get way overdone with it but it's really useful when you have like fabric that is just kind of sticking out on somebody's arm or something, it doesn't quite look right. I can come in here and just kind of try to push that down a little bit. If I get a smaller brush so I only affect that area. See how now that looks a little more like what should be there? Over here I think I have another little bump so I'll get a brush approximately the width of that, touch that up. Just know, here it looks fine with that sky but it is pushing the background as well. So there is a tool that allows you to undo what you've done and to lessen it. Let me first move some things around. Here, I'll pull in my earlobe thing to try to make it as if that was a problem with my anatomy. Don't worry, I'm not self-conscious. I'm not going, my ears! My dad's ears though, they were huge! Then the next tool down, this one, allows you to reconstruct areas, meaning that if you went too far with something, you could take that particular tool and say, I didn't mean to do that to the ear, somehow I want to get back. So I use this tool and watch when I paint across the ear. Do you see it coming back to the way it used to be? Now what's nice is if you just did a, I'll choose undo, if you just did a teeny bit too far and you want to undo, on the right side of your screen, there is a choice here called Density. And if I were to bring that down, I believe if I brought that down, this would, it'd take me a lot longer to get it back to normal so therefore I could just do very subtle changes, say just bring that back a tiny bit. And this is also could be used if parts of the background got distorted. Let's say this was a bathroom tile behind here so the grout lines need to be perfectly straight and now they've been pushed. I could try to paint on the background to get it, the distortion on the background to disappear, to stop it. The only thing is if I paint too close and I got to the part where the image had my shoulder there, suddenly my shoulder would start coming back to the way it used to be. Let's go down a little bit to this tool. This one here is going to rotate things. And if I first click here, watch what happens. Do you see it rotating? The longer you hold it, the more it rotates. And on the right side, if you lower the settings that are there, you can make it so it takes longer for it to make a change. So therefore, you can make much more subtle changes where you have to hold quite a long time before you see a big change. But that's one of the things it might be doing while it's thinking about making me smile is just rotating a little bit. This rotates it clockwise and that wouldn't be the right setting for over here. So if you hold down the option key, I believe it is, option means do the opposite in this case. So now, if I don't have option held down, you see the direction it's rotating? If I hold option down though, it goes the other way. So the combination of rotating a little bit and grabbing the tool that pushes things around could be used to come in here and manipulate a smile. But you're gonna be subtle in your manipulation, a lot more subtle than I'm doing here, in order to make it look realistic. But that's what that tool does is it rotates things. Clockwise, if you hover over it, it'll tell you with a tool tip. It says, Twirl Clockwise, that's the name. And if you hold option, you get counterclockwise. The next tool down is called the pucker tool. It's supposed to make me go pucker. Let's see what it does. If I do it on my eye, you see how it makes things smaller? Choose undo and it might be my cheeks are a little too puffy so I could try to take part of my cheek and just bring it in a little bit, and my whole jaw is a little bit much. Oftentimes, that's what I do is I just click and let go, click and let go to just do really brief changes that might build up. Maybe the tip of my nose is a little larger than I want it to be so I just do the tiniest. Like that. Now if I hold down option, you might be able to guess what it would do. Instead of pinching in and puckering things, it's gonna bloat things. So let's see, if I hold option, can you see my eye getting bigger? Like do that kind of stuff. So that always give you the opposite. In fact, the next tool down is called the bloat tool and it just does that to begin with. It's the opposite of the pucker tool. It makes things bigger and if you hold option, it will make things smaller. Just remember, if you mess up and create something that's a little scary like I have, you always have the reconstruct tool. Reconstruct means bring me closer to the original. So if I did a little too much, I just click and let go, click and let go briefly and if I click and hold, I will eventually get all the way back. And you're like, that's how weird my eyes usually look? But we can do that. Now other things. We have another tool called the push left tool, push left tool. Watch what happens if I drag up using this tool. See how it's pushing left? It just pushed the image. So if I happen to do that on the side of my nose like right here, it'd push it left. And if you lower the settings on the right side of your screen for Density and Rate, you can make it so it's not as aggressive with its pushing. Now if I want it to push the opposite direction, what I do is I actually don't hold down option usually. I just drag the opposite direction. I was dragging up. Now I'm gonna drag down. And can you notice it push the other way? I'll reconstruct my eye because I didn't want it to look weird. There, I reconstructed my eye. But that's gonna push. It depends on if you're dragging it up or down what direction it's going to push. And so usually you have to experiment first to remember what direction it's gonna push and then you'll get an idea. What I might do is push my nose like that and then just come back to the reconstruct tool. And if I lower its Density setting and possibly its Rate setting, I could come in here and just bring it somewhat back. I mean, I didn't want it that extreme but it might start extreme. You just kind of bring back parts of it with the reconstruct tool so it doesn't look as, you know, extreme of a change. Then below that we have two icons related to masking. And in the case of masking, it means that let's prevent areas from changing. Let's say that I really like the look of my nose and mouth at the moment and I'm gonna be making other changes to the image and I don't want the nose and mouth to change because they look great. So I'm gonna take the freeze tool, believe that's its name, and I'm gonna paint on top of the areas that I don't want to change. And by painting over them, these will literally be frozen where they cannot move. Then, any other tool that I use simply cannot affect that part of the image. So maybe I come in there and freeze this. And oftentimes, what this will be is a background. You'll be trying to slim somebody or do something like that, you'll have a background you're worried about getting distorted because you want to use a big brush so you can work on a large area of something, somebody's leg or whatever it happens to be, and you're gonna start outside of that person and just slowly move in towards them but you know your brush is gonna be 90% on the background when you do it so you freeze the background first. You just paint with red over all the background you don't want to change then you can move in there and you know you're only gonna start affecting those areas. So in this case, I'll use reconstruct, I'll try to get my eye back to normal and I know that if I paint over the nose, it's not going to bring the nose back. Maybe I want to bring my cheeks a little bit further back and other things, but that freezes them. Then, there is another icon down below which is known as the thaw tool or thaw mask tool and that simply removes the red stuff, which means, you know, let me change this area now. So red is a frozen area whereas this thaws the mask. There are options for it on the right side of my screen. There's an area here called Mask Options. There's a button called None which would clear off all the red stuff. So if I'm done working, you know, after freezing something, I can hit None. I can also say Mask All because then I might take the tool that takes away from the mask to say, this is the only part of the image I currently want to be able to change. So now everything else is frozen. There's also a button called Invert All which will give you the opposite. So I just worked the eye, now I want to do the stuff around it. So we have all that. There are a bunch of icons up here. I rarely use these but if you were to click on them, you have the choice of, if you had a selection active before you came in here, do you want it to freeze the area that was selected? Or if your layer was like the one of Karen where she's doing her yoga, you remember how it was on its own layer and it was empty around her? Then if I set her to Transparency, it would freeze the checkerboard, the empty parts. Or if I had a layer mask attached to the layer, I could tell it to use that. And actually, if you choose selection, I think it will also allow you to use saved selections. Like if you had any saved selections, it'll give you a list. Anyway, you can get fancy with that if you'd like. Then, if you continue down the tools, the next tool down is a tool you won't find in every version of Photoshop. It's supposed to look like a face, or a face and shoulders, and that's what I click on when I want to get in where I had all those little overlays as I moved my mouse over the various areas of my picture and I could fine tune the proportions of my face. If you find that those aren't visible, either you don't have the newest version of Photoshop, the one that was just announced, or that icon's not turned on. You're in one of the other tools. Then, there are a few other options down here. Here, we can show our image, which if we turn off, you won't see our image. You might be thinking, why would you ever not want to see your image? That's because there's an alternative. You could just see the mesh that describes the distortion being done where it's describing it's distorting this grid instead and therefore you can tell where the distortion is. That's really helpful when you're done and you want to see, is any part of the background still being distorted or not and so you turn on the mesh. And you can put both the mesh and the image on at the same time so you can see and therefore it might give you an idea of what parts do you need to clean up. Where did you not realize you had distortion that shouldn't have been there? And when you have Show Mesh turned on, down here, you can choose how big of a mesh and what color it is just so it separates from your image. And when you're using the freeze feature, there is a choice down here for what color that overlay is. Remember when I painted, it was red? Well, if you're working on a red firetruck, it's gonna be hard to see red, so you can change it. If you happen to be working on an image more like the image of Karen that I had where you isolated her on her own layer and it was mainly full of transparency around her and the background you saw was on a different layer, usually here you'd only see the one layer you're working on but here you can choose Show Backdrop. And if you choose Show Backdrop, you can say, show me all the layers that were in my image, that kind of stuff to see what it looks like with the rest of the image. In this case, though, that's not gonna be helpful. And then finally, if you completely screw up, we have a Restore All button which is gonna bring my image back to its original state when you're in here. So liquify can be overused but it can also be extremely helpful. And the main thing is to let the novelty wear off, meaning practice enough where you're doing funny stuff and then start learning how subtle you can be with it and really watch out for backgrounds that have been distorted that you just might not have been thinking about but other people will notice. If you go on Photoshop and, or you go on the web and search for Photoshop fails, you will find so many images where you'll find people have been nipping and tucking body parts and that backgrounds are so obviously manipulated that it's ridiculous and they'll tell you what publications they were published in. And you're like, really? For that publication, they were that bad? And part of it is they never turned on their mesh to see where is that distortion within the image so they see, is the background distorted? And then it just tells you if there's a bunch of distortion covering the background, you might want to inspect that part before you're done. So when you're done, you can click OK. And if you were working with a smart object, the changes you just made were not permanent. If you go right back into Liquify, it's as if you never left so you can continue to refine it which is real nice so that if you notice that background that got distorted only after you make a print, you can come back in and fix it very easily. Alright. We're gonna now look at another way of bending things. I want it to look as if this flag is bent, as if it's almost flapping in the wind. In fact, I'll show you an end result that I did. I think I have it, yeah, right here. So this was a graphic very similar to this one that had no lighting, that had no dimension to it whatsoever, and I was able to do the following. See how it's flapping in the wind? And notice that it has highlights and shadows on it to define it. And so I want to show you the general technique that was used for this and then it was just used over and over again to make multiple frames for this animation. So, I'll stop that. So what I have in this particular document is one layer per position of the flag. So if I turn on the other layers, you'll see the other positions. In fact, I should probably start at the bottom. You see them right now, one on top of the other now but I was just switching which version of the flag was visible. And we're gonna talk about the feature that was used to actually bend the flag. Before the flag was bent, it looked like that with no shading at all. And I'm gonna show you what bent the flag. Do you see this gray scale picture? That caused the flag to bend. Now we're gonna make a gray scale picture just like this one and we're gonna have it bend the flag. But let's look at or just think about what, how is it thinking about this? Why is this useful, this gray scale thing? Well, we're gonna have a gray scale image where Photoshop is gonna interpret it where any area that is 50% gray will be considered an area that does not move the flag at all, the flag remains where it was. Then, any area that is, if I get this right, brighter than 50% gray is where it's gonna move the flag closer to us. Any area that's darker than 50% gray will move it further away from us. So here, do you see how I have white? That's where the flag would be very close to us. Then that white fades out here. That's like the flag getting further away from us until it hits 50% gray where it's where the flag used to be. Then it starts getting darker as it goes over here. Darker means further away. So now it's going further away than it originally was and it gets as far away as it can right about here. And then it starts getting brighter as you go this way. Brighter means getting a little closer to us, closer to us, and it keeps doing that until it gets all the way up to white. When it comes to the animation, I had to get fancy and create more than one of these. If you watch, I can show you what they looked like. All it is is I moved those to the right like this. And I did need to get fancy one other way and that was when I did this, you'll notice that the flag looks like it's attached to the flagpole. It's got some extra layers in there so it's messing up right now but do you notice that it looks like the flag is attached right here and right there? That was accomplished, in each one of these, do you notice two dots of 50% gray right there? 50% gray means don't move. And so do you see, consistently in the same position, there are two dots of 50% gray? And that meant keep the flag stationary right here which is where I wanted it to be attached. So you know more information than you need to know for this technique for most purposes but hopefully gives you some sense for there's 50% gray means don't move, darker than 50% gray means move further from me, lighter than 50% gray means move closer. So then after that, we're gonna have to figure out how to get the highlights and the shadows and so we're gonna do it with this. I'm not gonna make the animation. That's just spending more time doing it. But what I will do here is I'm gonna change the name of the background layer. And I'm going to most likely turn this into, let's see, I think I can do it with a Smart Filter. And let's scale this down, I just typed command + T, so that we have some room for it to flap because otherwise, it'll be getting cropped off as it flaps. That, move it up, and I'm just gonna put something in here to replace the checkerboard. I'll go to the bottom of my Layers panel, click on the adjustment layer icon and choose Solid Color and why don't we just put it on black. I'll put the black underneath my Layers panel. And just to simplify the look in the Layers panel, I don't need the mask. The mask would allow me to limit where the black shows up but I want it to fill the screen so just to simplify the look, I'll drag the mask to the trash. Okay, so we just have a simple flag, which is a smart object with the black beneath it. Next, we're gonna create a gray scale picture that's gonna tell it how to bend the flag. To accomplish that, I'll create a new layer. I'll grab my paintbrush tool and I'm just gonna get a huge soft edge brush and I'm gonna paint with black like this. I just painted like a V-shape. Then I'm gonna switch and paint with white and I'm gonna draw a V-shape just so the flag isn't perfectly straight the way it bends. Instead, it's kind of ruffled. And I'll draw another white one here. So if I hide the other layers, this is what I have on the top layer. Now I want some areas to be 50% gray because that means where shouldn't it move things. I can't have the empty part, I need something in there. We're gonna use a weird feature in Photoshop to get 50% gray in there. I'll go to the Edit menu and choose Fill. And when you fill something, one of the choices you have for what to fill with is 50% Gray. But right now, since there's no selection active, it would fill the entire layer. It would get rid of all this and just fill the whole layer with gray. But check this out. Do you remember blending modes? Well, there are two blending modes in here that aren't found elsewhere and they are Behind and Clear. Behind means act as if I'm putting this behind this layer on a separate layer but don't do it on a separate layer, do it within this one, meaning fill only the empty parts. So when I say fill with 50% gray but do it behind what's already in this layer, it just filled the empty parts. So that's kind of a cool setting. Alright, now, hopefully that'll be what we want for our bending, so let's think about it. In fact, I probably should have had some 50% gray areas in there. Maybe I'll come in with my brush and just create some. I'll just make this a little smaller, that a little smaller. I was just painting with 50% gray. So this is gonna mean, here, don't move my flag. Then, this is gonna say move it close to me. This is gonna say move it far away. This is move close to me again and then don't change its position. Does that make sense from the way I described it on the other? Now I need to take this and save it as a separate document so I'm gonna just go over here and choose Save As. I'm gonna put it on my Desktop and I'm gonna save it in Photoshop file format but I'm not gonna save the layers because we don't need those other parts that are in there. We just want this gray thing. So I'm just saying Photoshop file format, no layers. Alright, I'm gonna put this in one other place. We don't need it to bend the flag in this other place but we'll need it right afterwards and that is, I'm gonna put it in the Channels panel. So to put it in the Channels panel, I can Select All, and Copy. And then I can go to Channels, if you happen to have it open on your screen. Otherwise, you'll have to go to the Window menu to get the Channels panel and at the bottom, there's a new channel icon, same thing as the new layer icon. It's like a sheet of paper with the corner turned up. I'll click it which will create a brand new channel and then I'll choose Paste. Okay, so in my Channels panel we have that. We'll need that to get the lighting. It's weird that it needs to be there but it does. Now anytime you've worked with channels, to get back to your normal image, you always click on the name up here, RGB. That means get me back to normal. Alright, we got everything we need. What have we done? We got our flag on its own layer, we got some sort of backdrop for it, and we got this gray stuff we made. And we actually don't need that gray stuff anymore. I can throw it away because we got it saved in the two locations we need it. One is in a file in my hard drive, the other is in the Channels panel. So now we can do what we wanted to do. I'm gonna bend the flag. Filter, Distort, Displace. It's called a displacement map. The map is the file that I saved. So I'm gonna choose Displace, this comes up. The number you type in determines how severely it will bend the image. I'll leave it at the default of 10 just to show you what it would do and then we'll change it if we need to. I'll click OK and it's asking me for what's known as the map, so that's why I called my file, This is the MAP. But that's just that gray scale picture we saved. The map tells it how to bend the image. So I click Open and then it should bend the image. Now it did, if I choose undo, can you see a slight bend? But it's barely anything, isn't it? So let's choose Undo and try it one more time. And when we do this time, choose Displace, I'm gonna type in, if 10 was only that little amount, what do you think? 50, 40, something like that, I'm just guessing. There's two numbers, you want to type them both in the same otherwise you'll distort your image in only one direction, like horizontally and it won't move it vertically at all. Anyway, I'll click OK and I grab that file again. And now with 50, hopefully, it'll start looking more bent. I might even be able to go higher than 50. Choose Undo. Wouldn't it be nice if there was a preview? 75. It's starting to look bent, isn't it? But it's all based on that gray scale picture. But the problem is, there is no shading on it at all. So somehow, I want to add shading. We're gonna do that with a filter that's called Lighting Effects. Lighting Effects, I can also feed a gray scale picture. And if I do, it will think of it as what's a, I think it might be known as a bump map, which means it thinks of it as describing the three-dimensionality of a surface so it knows it's not lighting something that's flat. And it thinks the same way as this filter does. Now, the problem is, when I try to use the filter, I think it's under Render. It's called, Render, Lighting Effects. The problem is that if I just come in here and use it, at the top, you have various presets. We're just gonna find one that looks like its pointing light at that thing. Take me a minute to, Circle of Light. No, not that thing, geez. Just looking for a very basic lighting. Maybe a Flashlight. We could use that and I can actually move it. But right here on the right side is a choice called Texture. And if you click there, this is listing all the channels in your picture and that's why we had to save that gray scale image also in the Channels panel. And so I'll choose Alpha 1 and then that means it thinks it's three-dimensional. And here is the Height setting, which means how bent does it think it is, and I'll probably have to turn that way up. In fact, I'm not sure, it might be the same measurement system and if so, didn't I use 75 on the image? And do you see how it's adding some lighting? The problem is, it will have a texture to it. Do you see the texture? So first I should probably get a better light source. I can either modify this one by trying to pull on it, maybe make it bigger, maybe move it a little bit. I'm not a Lighting Effects guy, as far as I don't use this on a daily basis by any means at all but I know enough to make it get my image's shading. So I'll set it up and I'll click OK but the problem is that we have the noise in it. Do you see what it looks like? So we need to do something to get that on its own layer because if it's on its own layer, I can blur it. Right now, if I blur while it's still attached to this layer it's gonna blur not only the lighting effect but the flag. So let's try that once more. I'm actually gonna throw away the choice called Lighting Effects in my Layers panel. I want to do it to a separate layer on top and we're gonna have to get tricky. You know, we've gone through sessions on blending modes before and we're gonna use blending modes to get that on some layer. Because what happens if I just create an empty layer and that's where I want to put it, then I come down here and choose Render and choose Lighting Effects, the only thing Lighting Effects can do is brighten or darken what you feed it. And what am I feeding it right now in my Layers panel? Nothing, it's empty. So Lighting Effects can't work on an empty layer. We need a layer full of something. So we're gonna cheat. When we talked about blending modes, there was an entire set of blending modes where 50% gray went away and where anything brighter than 50% gray could brighten what's underneath, anything that's darker than 50% gray could darken what's underneath and those were blending modes like Soft Light, Hard Light, and Overlay. There's a whole group. It's the biggest group of the blending modes. I don't know if you recall that or not but we're gonna use it so here's what we're gonna do. We'll get tricky. I'm gonna create a brand new empty layer which I would usually do by clicking on the new layer icon. But usually when you click there, it doesn't ask you to name the layer unless you hold down the option key. I'm gonna hold down option this time, that's alt in Windows, and I'll click. Now it'll ask me to name it and I'll just call it Lighting but it also gives me a few other options. And what I'll do is choose one of those blending modes in that section where 50% gray goes away. The one I'll use is called Hard Light. Then, there's something special below. Look what it says. Do we want to automatically fill the layer we're about to create with the color that disappears in Hard Light mode, which happens to be 50% gray? Yeah. So now what it's gonna do here is not only create a brand new empty layer, it's gonna fill the empty layer with 50% gray and it's gonna change the blending mode at the top of my Layers panel to what I've asked for right there. So we're getting kind of fancy. When I click OK, we can confirm that. If you look in the Layers panel, see it's full of 50% gray set to Hard Light. So now let's go to Filter, Render, Lighting Effects, and let's see if it remembers, it remembers our setting. It doesn't see the flag because we're not working on the layer of the flag. It looks like it remembered all my settings. But you can get an idea right now, doesn't that look pushed in? And so does maybe part of that. But that's where we were painting those different shades. I'm just gonna click OK. And now, because that layer is in Hard Light mode, the 50% gray just goes away. I see this but you see all the texture so all we're gonna do is afterwards, we're gonna blur it to get all that texture to blur into the image. See how we can't see the texture anymore. There we go! Now the lighting effect is going beyond onto the black background. If we don't want it to, then we have to get even fancier. I know we're getting pretty fancy here. But do you remember the first time we talked about layers, we had some photographs sitting on top of some text? Somehow we got the photo to only show up inside the text and when we were done, we had a down-pointing arrow in that layer to indicate that this is clipped to what's under it. Well, in this case, we have a similar situation. We just happen to have our lighting on a layer. We want it to only show up where the flag is. And there are a couple different ways of doing it but one was to go to the Layer menu and choose Create Clipping Mask. Now the lighting gets taken off of everything else. So now we've gotten our flag to be sitting there. And to make that animation, I repeated this process and I actually did it in a somewhat automated way. I made sure the spacing of my paint strokes was even so that I could move them over instead of redrawing them. They'd be consistent. And when I was done, I put gray dots where they should have been attached but it wasn't as hard as it might sound if you can think through a few features that help you. So if you ever have something that's flat and you want it to look like it's curved or there's an indent in it or sticking up or whatever, we can do this and we can do this with things that you might not think of. I'm gonna do it one more time. I'm not gonna describe every single step because it just takes too long and we'll take the same flag and we're gonna bend it to conform to my face. Let me just grab that flag, I'll drag it over. We'll make it so maybe my eye's got the blue part of the flag on it. I want my eye showing through the one part of the flag. Okay, so we got that just right. Now, this is what'll be interesting. You know how we had to have that gray scale image that described what's close to us, what's far away? I'm just gonna use a copy of my face. It's not gonna be accurate but it'll be close enough to fool your eyes. I'll duplicate this image so we don't screw this one up. Under the Image menu, we have the choice of Duplicate. Then, all I'm gonna do is simplify it. I'm gonna say make it black and white. Get rid of all my layers. I'm going to then look at my face and do you see my pores? They're darker than my skin, aren't they? Don't dark things mean they're further away? So that means drill holes in my head is what they're gonna act like so I'm gonna blur this to smooth it out enough so that my pores go away, so it thinks of my face as instead being smooth. I like that. And I'm gonna save that in Photoshop file format wherever I can remember it. So what did I do? Duplicated the image, made it black and white, blurred it until the fine detail went away, okay. Then I can close it. Now let's bend a flag. Got our flag, go to Filter, Distort, Displace. I don't know, that might be too much, it's hard to say, let's find out. I'm gonna use 50, I just think it might be too much. Click OK, it'll ask me for the file. It's right there. Now it's hard to tell if that's right or not. That just looks weird, doesn't it? So let's apply it to my face as if it was ink. Isn't that what one of these blending modes does? It's the one called Multiply. And if you look, look at where the ridge of my nose is and look at what the flag is doing. Is it not going right up the ridge? And right here where it's coming down, it's not exactly right, but look. It's coming right down where the cheek is. It's close enough to fool things. So now the only thing I might do is hide the flag and select the sky that's back here. Go back to my flag and I might hide it in those areas. I'll add a layer mask, I'll hold option to say hide instead of keep the selected. And I might also grab my paintbrush and with the paintbrush active, I might come in and get it off my eyeballs because that would be a painful tattoo. I need to paint with black though. I can't see my eyeball so I'll get rid of it over the whole thing and then I'll switch and paint with white, bring it back. There we go. Doesn't that look weird? That can be anything though, it doesn't have to be a flag. This could be a car and you have wood, you want it to look like a car made out of wood. Alright, that can work. Because most of the time, the highlights and the shadows on three-dimensional objects are close enough to define their shape. It won't work for every single thing you ever try it on but it'll work for an amazing number of things that you wouldn't otherwise assume it would. You gotta experiment, okay? So in this case, to apply it, I used Multiply mode but we could experiment with the other modes. Maybe I use Overlay, that's a little too much. I think in general though, the bright, if I use these modes, remember there are white stripes in the flag and things brighter than 50% gray will brighten so I think those will be too much but maybe some of these if I just use Darken or one of the others. You can actually experiment if you're in the move tool, shift and plus. Oh I like that one, what's that? Color Burn. It's too much, lower the opacity. Uh-huh, but like I said, cars and other objects. I've done this to it and it works great. Alright, then I did tell you that I would tell you how to create a perspective grid so let's do that. Because remember when we had the bus and we're putting it on there and I wasn't exactly certain what angle to do things at? So here is how to do a perspective grid. This is not something I do everyday so I probably won't do it in the most efficient way possible but I'll show you what I'm thinking about. If you look at a flat surface within this photograph, let's say the side of the building, you can see how it's being distorted by perspective in that this line here is going off, if you were to continue it, you could imagine it going off into the distance if this building was deeper. Well, if you were to do that with this line here and do it with another line that would be parallel to this line in real life, meaning you see this green line up here, don't you think that is on the same angle as this in real life? Well, if I were to do that and continue it on and keep going and going and going to the right, eventually those two lines would connect into what's known as the vanishing point of that surface. Does that make sense? We want to find that vanishing point and I'm gonna do it by creating a new layer. And I can use all sorts of tools. I'm gonna use the Line Tool that's down here in my Shape Tool. Can you see it? Line Tool. And with the Line Tool up here, I can tell it the weight, I'll make it, I don't know, nine pixels. And let's choose my fill, whatever. You can set it up however you'd like. Then what I'm gonna do is trace over that bottom edge where the building is and I'm just gonna draw this line but I'm gonna draw it until it goes way beyond the edge of my document over here and I'm gonna move it up and down until it's parallel with the bottom of the building, okay. And this is better to do on a large screen because you can be zoomed up more but I'm gonna do that. Let go, you see my line? Then I'm gonna click on the green line that was up there. I'll click on one edge and I'll pull way out beyond the edge of my document and again, I'll get it to line up. That look about right? What we have just found is the vanishing point of this image. Now, I can't see where those two cross because when I drew this, at the top of your screen, you can tell it, this means, if you hover over this, it tells you what it means, Path operations. And if you click, it means every one should create a new layer. If I had had this set to this, both lines would be on the same layer so I could still see them both beyond the edge of the document. I'll hit delete to get rid of that one. I'll just redo that top one with the tool up here set to Combine Shapes, meaning don't create a new layer every time. So then I can do this and get it to line up looking at the building. Alright, so right there is my vanishing point for that particular surface. I can then show my rulers. And I can click on a ruler and pull out a guide to mark where the vanishing point is located so it's easy for me to find it. And then, all I need to do is draw lines all starting from that exact point and make them equally spaced as I go up. So what I can do is go to View and I'm gonna choose Show, Grid. So there's my grid and I can get rid of the lines we already have and create new ones because they don't necessarily line up with exactly how far I want these. Or I can keep them because right now they look like they're close to hitting the grid lines right where the edge of this building is. But I can just draw lines now from the vanishing point and I want to make them equally spaced on the grid. So I'll go up, let's say, two notches on the grid each time. Then I'll draw from the vanishing point two notches up the grid. Then I'll draw on the vanishing point, from the vanishing point two notches up on the grid. Is that two, I can't, yeah, two. And I'll just keep doing that two notches each time. So I need to get rid of that other line up there. I should have deleted it. Right now, it'll be messy to select it so ignore the one line that was already up there. But if I were to do this, going an equal amount up each time, this is a perspective grid. And let me turn off the grid, the grid I've been using, and we would need to, I'm not sure if I'll be able to easily select this but that one extra line. It is this one right here, let's see if I can get rid of it. We'll find out, yeah, okay, I was able to click on it with the what's called the direct selection tool which is this guy here and hit delete for that one we didn't need. But anyway, this grid can be useful. I'll also come in here and clear my, or at least hide, my guides, okay. Now let's say I had something that I needed to put in this image and I wanted it to look as if the surface of something was parallel with the side of that building. Well, I would want the angle of the top and bottom, just like the top and bottom of my bus, to line up with these lines, to be parallel with the lines as they get close to it. And if so, the perspective would look right. Or let's say I wanted to put something in my picture that was about the same height as this object in the background but I want to put it closer to the camera and I don't know how big it should look when it gets closer to the camera. Well, I count how many of these lines I made tall is that object. For now, we'll even pay attention to the little spikes coming out if it and say it's what, one, two, just under three lines tall. So that means if I want to put it near the front of the building, I go just under three lines tall. So it would have to be one, two, just under that, it would have to be this tall starting right there to look to be the same size as that one with the perspective that's in this image. And you can extend these lines off to infinity going the other way. I just wasn't zoomed out on my document far enough. You could also do it to more than one surface of your image. So if I did the same thing here, drawing a red line across the bottom of this building and extending it way out beyond the edge and then I took this top line up here and did the same thing, they would cross eventually somewhere outside the document usually. And I could make the other grid going this way so that if there was a surface that should be parallel with the front of the building, I can figure out what angle would it be at. And if I wanted something to be just as tall as this pump but I want it to be way over here, I would count the same number of lines high and when I get way over there and I would go the same number I would be able to figure out how big it should be. I don't know if that makes too much sense to you. It all depends how much you're used to thinking about three-dimensional space, okay. And I'd usually put that on its own layer so I can just turn it off and on whenever I need it. So most of the time it'd be turned off but when I need to size something to make sure it looks like it's the right size, I could use it. But that's known as a perspective grid. And that's what I could've done right here when I had my bus right there. Then I could be able to tell what angle should things be at. I could do one grid for this surface of the thing and the other grid for either this or this surface to figure out what the front and the sides of the bus should be. Well, this has been thinking about how to warp, bend, liquify and do all sorts of things to our layers. You don't always need to use it for what I just showed you. Oftentimes, you need to bend things when you're doing retouching. I'm retouching, I need to put something on top of something else but it just doesn't line up quite right. So as I showed you the other day, you can use something like Puppet Warping. But it's not always Puppet Warping. Sometimes it's the normal kind of warping I used to put something on a coffee mug. Sometimes it's any of these choices. It's not always to make a special effect. It's sometimes to do very practical things like when you're doing retouching and I can only copy from this particular part of the image because it's the only clean material that looks like what I need but it needs to appear over here in a completely different angle and bend and all this stuff. Well, then you need to use some of these choices. So let's think about tomorrow. Tomorrow, we're gonna talk about Advanced Layers. So today we got into a few little advanced things with layers like when I created a brand new layer that was automatically full of 50% gray, it was automatically in Hard Light mode, and we were getting kind of fancy in there. But tomorrow, we get to explore all the interesting features that are hidden away in our Layers panel that make it much more powerful. But before then, why don't you head over to the Facebook group? If you haven't been in it yet, this is the web address to go to to find it. You do have to ask to join it by clicking the button there. We'll approve you pretty quick and then you can come in and ask whatever questions. And if you use something like the Displace filter, for instance, to bend something and you have an interesting example, why don't you upload it and share it with everybody else? You'll get feedback and if you have questions about it, you'll get answers, all that kind of stuff. It's a great community to be in. We had it for a whole month for our Lightroom group. We had close to 3,000 people in there and I think, well everybody's begging not to shut it down at the end of that group because they found it to be so useful. So be sure to get over there into the Facebook group. It's a private group so whatever you post in there is only seen by group members so a lot of your clients and other people that usually visit your Facebook page won't see it unless they happen to be watching this class and get in there. Finally, if you want to find me on the web, here are various choices I had mentioned. Those pictures of my wife doing yoga around the world, the bottom choice right there, that's where you can find her on Instagram. You'll see a whole bunch of those images. This has been another installment of Photoshop CC, the Complete Guide. I hope to see you next time.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Color Palettes
Edges and Textures
Hand-drawn Frames
Hand-drawn Graphics
Layout Templates
Practice Images - Lesson 18: Tips and Tricks
Practice Images - Lesson 19: Actions and Automation
Practice Images - Lesson 17: Advanced Layers
Practice Images - Lesson 12: Advanced Masking
Practice Images - Lesson 15: Advanced Retouching
Practice Images - Lesson 10: Blending Modes
Practice Images - Lesson 2: Camera Raw
Practice Images - Lesson 8: Color Adjustments
Practice Images - Lesson 5: Layer Masks
Practice Images - Lesson 4: Layers
Practice Images - Lesson 9: Retouching Essentials
Practice Images - Lesson 3: Selection Essentials
Practice Images - Lesson 14: Shooting for Photoshop
Practice Images - Lesson 13: Smart Objects
Practice Images - Lesson 1: Starting from Zero
Practice Images - Lesson 7: Tonal Adjustments
Practice Images - Lesson 6: Tools and Panels
Practice Images - Lesson 20: Troubleshooting and Advice
Practice Images - Lesson 16: Warp Bend Liquify
Practice Images - Lesson 11: Filters
Script Elements
Week 1 - Day 1 Homework
Week 1 - Day 2 Homework
Week 1 - Day 3 Homework
Week 1 - Day 4 Homework
Week 1 - Day 5 Homework
Week 1 - Photoshop CC Workbook
Bit Depth
Color Modes
Color Spaces
Logic of Keyboard Shortcuts
Pen Tool
Printing
Resolution
Week 2 - Day 6 Homework
Week 2 - Day 7 Homework
Week 2 - Day 8 Homework
Week 2 - Day 9 Homework
Week 2 - Day 10 Homework
Week 2 - Photoshop CC Workbook
Homework - Shooting for Photoshop in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Smart Objects in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Filters in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Advanced Masking in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Advanced Retouching in Adobe Photoshop CC
Week 3 - Photoshop CC Workbook
Homework - Warp, Bend, Liquify, in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Tips & Tricks in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Actions & Automation in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Troubleshooting & Advice in Adobe Photoshop CC
Homework - Advanced Layers in Adobe Photoshop CC
Week 4 - Photoshop CC Workbook
Bens Actions Sampler ReadMe
Bens Actions Sampler
Bens Styles Sampler ReadMe
Bens Styles Sampler
Texture Sampler
Sharpening
Save for Web
Facebook Q&A #1
Facebook Q&A #2
Q&A #3
PSD Preferences
File Formats
Customizing PSD

Ratings and Reviews

Mary
 

Ben Willmore is exceptionally and intimately knowledgeable about Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, including Bridge and Camera Raw, and how they work together. He's also a wonderful photographer. That's great, but what's even better for us is that he's an incredible and generous teacher. He shares his knowledge and experience in an organized, thorough, thoughtful and relatable way. I envy his efficiency with words and ideas! He isolates hard-to-understand concepts - things we'd be unlikely to figure out on our own - and explains them in simple terms and with on point and memorable examples. I completely enjoy Ben's teaching methods and his personality. His admiration and appreciation of his wife, Karen, are telling of what a good guy he must be, and he's got just an overall pleasant personality. I love his amusement when something "ridiculous" happens during an edit! This bootcamp is fantastic and just what I need. It's only one of Ben's many CL classes that I've watched and learned from - they are all excellent. Thank you, Ben Willmore. (And Karen!)

Lynn Buente
 

I purchased this course ---SMART MOVE!--because, at 74, I learn more slowly and need more practice. While I've had some "novice" experience with PS, this course is moving me along in a totally different way. Most tutorials just tell you what to do. Ben tells you not only WHAT to do, but WHY (--or why not) and HOW. Understanding better can lead to using the practices in PS more fluently AND to greater freedom to be creative. I find Ben's approach to be kind of a "come as you are" session. No matter where you are on the learning spectrum, there is something to review, something new, or a brand new challenge. The relaxed manner of presentation is great, but doesn't minimize the content of the class. I appreciate the additional explanations and theory. These help to make total sense of the tools and practices of good editing. I would really recommend that, if possible, you purchase the course. The practice images, the homework, and the evolving workbook are great review and reference points. Personally, I have downloaded the classes by week so I can view, re-view, and stop, start, and repeat segments as often as I need to --which is often! Also, sometimes I like to view and work on one segment of the class at a time. My study of this course will be a LOT LONGER than four weeks, and I know I'll be referring to it as long as I'm a Photoshop user. Thanks, Ben! (And thanks to your wife for her contribution as well.)

Carol Senske
 

I've used PS for about five years in many of it's various versions. Learning on your won is a tough proposition, and I've struggled the whole time. Seeing work I admired and that inspired me to strive for great er things then not being ablr to figure out how to do them was a major frustration. The jargon was sometimes foreign, the complexity of the program overwhelming but I soldiered on and learned bits and pieces. A friend recommended Ben's course and I immediately came to CL to see what she was so thrilled about - I was amazed! Ben is down-to-earth, explains each step, gives shortcuts, defines terms, and shows how to accomplish what he's teaching. After two weeks I bought the class. I not only bought the Photoshop course but I added the Lightroom course as well. I'll do that, on my own, when things slow down a bit, and I have no doubt that course will help me even more than the PS course. I'm totally at sea with LR. I like Ben's teaching style, appreciate all the homework and extras included, and greatly appreciate the magnificent, easy to use, workbook by Ben's wife. I give my wholehearted endorsement for this course!

Student Work

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