- 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
Liquify Filter: Liquify’s Other Killer Tool for Retouching Body Parts
There’s more to the awesome Liquify filter than just the facial recognition sliders (which we looked at earlier in this chapter)—namely, there’s the Forward Warp tool, which is way more useful and easier to use than it sounds. It lets you move your subject around like they were made of a thick liquid (think molasses), and there are two tricks to using it well: (1) make your brush just a little larger than the size of the thing you want to move, and (2) just slowly nudge with it. Don’t paint big strokes; just gently nudge. Do those two things, and you’ll make realistic retouches and leave no sense of what was done.
Step One:
In this particular pose, it looks like our subject has a small bone sticking out of her shoulder on the right (I circled it here in red). This is a 10-second fix using Photoshop’s Liquify filter, so go under the Filter menu up top and choose Liquify (as shown here).
)
Step Two:
When the Liquify dialog appears, chose the top tool in the Toolbar on the left: the Forward Warp tool (W; the one that moves things around like they’re made of a thick liquid). We’re going to use it to get rid of that bump on her shoulder. Remember, one of the two main tricks for success with this tool is to make your brush just a little bigger than the thing you want to retouch. You resize the brush by using the Left and Right Bracket keys on your keyboard (they’re to the immediate right of the P key on a standard US keyboard). Pressing the Left Bracket key makes the brush smaller; pressing the Right Bracket key makes it larger. Here, I’ve made it a little larger than the area we want to retouch.
)
Step Three:
Now take the Forward Warp tool’s brush and just nudge that bump right down (as shown here). The whole process takes all of 10 seconds. If for any reason you don’t like the results, press Command-Z (PC: Ctrl-Z) to Undo your retouch, and give it another try. Remember the second tip: just gently nudge with this brush for the best results.
)
Tip: Freezing Parts you Don’t Want to Move
If you’re moving a large section of anything (like maybe someone’s ears, or the side of their face, or their waist, etc.), when you use the Forward Warp tool, you always run the risk of moving things you don’t want to move (like their eyes, or cheeks, or nose). You can lock down any areas you don’t want to move at all by painting over them with the Freeze Mask tool (F; it’s the fifth tool from the bottom in the Toolbar). Just paint over those areas and they appear in a red tint, letting you know they’re frozen and will now not move, no matter what. When you’re done with the Forward Warp tool, you can erase those red frozen areas with the Thaw Mask tool (D; it’s right below the Freeze Mask tool). Just paint over the red areas to unfreeze them.
Step Four:
After we’re done fixing that shoulder bone, we can make a small adjustment where her arm meets her blouse (as shown here). Remember the two important tips for the best results: (1) make the brush just a little larger than what you want to move, and (2) just gently nudge with the brush.
)
