- Liquify Filter: Retouching Facial Features the Easy Way
- Feather & Free Transform: Making Facial Features Symmetrical
- Feather Selection: Trimming Eyebrows
- Brush Tool: Removing Eye Veins
- Healing Brush & Patch Tools: Removing Blemishes
- Apply Image & Gaussian Blur: The Secret to Great-Looking Skin
- Liquify Filter: Liquify’s Other Killer Tool for Retouching Body Parts
- Liquify Filter: Creating Beautiful Teeth
- Pinch Filter: Reducing Jaws and Jowls
- Puppet Warp: Repositioning Body Parts Using Puppet Warp
- Free Transform: Covering Studio Mistakes
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Puppet Warp: Repositioning Body Parts Using Puppet Warp
You reach for Puppet Warp when you need to reposition a body part. It can be a big part of the body, like from the waist up, or the head and shoulders, or it can be as small as repositioning somebody’s hand or fingers. It works astonishingly well, and it is an underused and underestimated retouching tool. Use it once or twice, and you’ll see how powerful it is and will want to add it to your retouching arsenal. In the first example here, we’re going to reposition our subject’s head, so it’s more upright and not leaning to the left.
Step One:
First, select your subject and put them up on their own layer (as seen here). I did this by getting the Quick Selection tool (W), and then, up in the Options Bar, clicking the Select Subject button to have Photoshop automatically put a basic selection around my subject. Then, I clicked the Select and Mask button, chose the Refine Edge Brush tool (R; in the Select and Mask Toolbar), and painted along the edges of her hair to select the ends. Then, I chose to put my selected subject up on her own layer. (Note: We’ll look at how to make selections like this more in Chapter 5. It’s way easier than you’d think.) With your subject on their own layer, use the Clone Stamp tool (S) to get rid of them on the Background layer by Option-clicking (PC: Alt-clicking) on a background area to sample it, then painting over the subject to clone them away (here, I only cloned away her top half, since we’re only adjusting that area).
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Step Two:
Next, go under the Edit menu and choose Puppet Warp. This brings up a mesh over your image (seen here). The mesh is right up against the edges of your subject, and this can sometimes create jaggy edges around them. So, in the Options Bar, increase the Expansion amount to between 20 and 25 pixels. That expands the outside edges of the mesh, giving you a little breathing room, so you don’t get those “jaggies.” By the way, for a simple reposition like this, leaving the Density pop-up menu, in the Options Bar, set to Normal will work just fine. If what you’re moving is smaller and/or more detailed, like feet or hands, choose More Points for a tighter mesh, or if what you want to move is large and simple, choose Fewer Points for a looser mesh with less points.
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Step Three:
Now we’re going to click to add anchor points on areas we don’t want to move to lock them down. We’ll start by clicking on the left side of her dress, and then we’ll continue on up—one on her left elbow, one near her shoulder, one right below her neck, and one on her forehead (that’s the one we’ll move to make her head more upright). Then, click down her right side—one near her shoulder, one on the outside of her forearm, and then another one on the right side of the dress (you can see all my anchor points circled here in red). Although we’re only going to move the one of her forehead (so we can reposition her head, so it’s more upright instead of leaning to the left), you can click-and-move any of these points. If we don’t touch them, they act as anchors to keep those areas from moving. If you start moving an area and it moves other areas right around it, too (and you didn’t want those other areas to move), click to add more points nearby to keep those areas from moving.
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Step Four:
When I’m working with Puppet Warp, once my anchor points are in place, I like to hide the mesh from view so it’s not distracting me from having a clear view of the changes I’m making. To hide it, press Command-H (PC: Ctrl-H). With that mesh hidden, the only things that are left visible are those anchor points we laid down (look at how much easier it is to see what you’re doing with that mesh hidden from view). Now, click on the point on the top of her forehead and drag it slightly to the right, so her head is more upright (as shown here). The area around her head moves pretty naturally, and the whole repositioning is very fluid-like.
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Tip: Removing Pins
To remove a pin you’ve added, press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key, then move your cursor over the pin you want to remove, and it will change into a pair of scissors. Click once with the scissors to remove that pin.
Step Five:
When you’re done with your Puppet Warp adjustment, press the Return (PC: Enter) key to lock in your adjustment. I put a before/after here, so you can see her before the adjustment, with her head tilted to the left (on the left), and after Puppet Warp, with her head more straightened and upright (on the right). Okay, let’s look at another example, because I really want you to be able to use this when you need to.
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Step Six:
In this shot, I fired my camera a split-second too soon and didn’t get her leg bent up high enough. But, that’s an easy thing to fix with Puppet Warp. Remember, the first step is to put a selection around your subject, and then put them up on their own layer, which is what I did here, using the same technique as before—I chose the Quick Selection tool from the Toolbar, then clicked the Select Subject button in the Options Bar to put a basic selection in place. Next, I fine-tuned the selection by clicking the Select and Mask button. When the Select and Mask options appeared, I used the Refine Edge Brush tool to paint over the edges of her hair (as shown here). By the way, to make things easier for me to see what’s selected, from the View pop-up menu, at the top of the Properties panel, I choose Overlay. That puts a red tint over everything that’s not selected, and things that I have selected appear in color, like you see here. Again, there’s more about this selection stuff in Chapter 5. When you’re done, near the bottom of the Properties panel, choose New Layer from the Output To pop-up menu, so your selected subject appears on their own separate layer.
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Step Seven:
With your subject now up on their own layer, go under the Edit menu and choose Puppet Warp to put a mesh over your subject (as seen here). Now, put down your anchor pins (I added them on her left wrist; her opposite leg, right where her dress ends; one on the bend of her bent leg; one just below the knee on her straight leg; and the one I want to move, I put on the top of her left foot (they’re all circled here in red). Next, click on that foot pin and drag it up so the leg bends upward more, like you see here on the right, where I simply dragged it up. When it looks good to you, hit Return (PC: Enter) to lock in your change. Now you have that matter of the extra leg on the original Background layer. In the Layers panel, hide the top layer by clicking on the Eye icon to the left of the layer’s thumbnail, and then click on the Background layer to make it active. Then, get the Lasso tool (L) from the Toolbar, draw a loose selection around the part of her leg that you moved, then hit Delete (PC: Backspace) and choose Content-Aware, from the Fill dialog’s Contents pop-up menu, to automatically fill that area with some of the gray background. Click OK, press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to Deselect, and then click where the Eye icon used to be to the left of the top layer’s thumbnail to turn it back on. Easy peasy!
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Step Eight:
Here’s the before and after, with the original on the left and the version after the Puppet Warp adjustment on the leg on the right, with it kicked up higher.
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