- 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
Free Transform: Covering Studio Mistakes
I usually run into this problem (or something like it) while I’m doing a portrait retouch (due to my frequent use of seamless paper backgrounds in the studio), so I’m including it here in the retouching chapter, although you could make a case for it to be in the chapter where we fix, repair, remove, and cover stuff (Chapter 8). But, anyway, it just seems like it should be here (it’s such an easy fix that if you learn it now, you’ll wind up using it in other places).
Step One:
In this instance, my seamless roll of red paper wasn’t wide enough to cover my background stands and other gear, so we’re going to use a quick retouching trick to extend the background. Get the Rectangular Marquee tool (M) from the Toolbar (by the way, this gets my vote for the “This tool should be renamed” annual award. Just change the word “Marquee” to “Selection,” and then we’ll all know what it means). Anyway, get that tool and click-and-drag out a tall selection in a clean area of background right near where the problem is. Now, press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to bring up the Free Transform bounding box around your selected area. You can see here it added control points to the corners and at the center of each side (we learned about Free Transform back in Chapter 1).
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Step Two:
When you move your cursor over a control point, if you look really closely, you can see that it turns into a two-headed arrow, which you can drag in or out. So, to cover all the junk you see on the right, behind my red seamless paper, just grab the right center control point and simply stretch that selected area out, right off the edge of the image, so it covers over that stuff (as shown here). When you’re done with this side, just click anywhere outside the bounding box to lock in your transformation, then press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to Deselect your rectangular selection. Okay, now let’s fix the other side.
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Step Three:
There’s a much smaller gap on the left side (but it’s still a gap), and we’ll do the same thing to fix it. With the Rectangular Marquee tool, click-and-drag out a tall rectangular selection in a nearby area of clean background. Then, press Command-T (PC: Ctrl-T) to bring up the Free Transform bounding box around your selected area (as seen here).
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Step Four:
Now, the same technique, different side. Grab the left center control point and drag it all the way over to the left (it’s okay to pull it right off the edge of the image) to stretch that clean selected area over so it covers that gap (as shown here). Click anywhere outside the bounding box to lock in your transformation, then press Command-D (PC: Ctrl-D) to Deselect. Told ya it was easy.
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