Techie Tip of the Week: Use Puppet Warp to Manipulate Photos in Photoshop

The Puppet Warp tool in Photoshop allows you to manipulate and distort specific image areas of an image while keeping other areas exactly as they are.

You can use Puppet Warp to do small manipulations, such as straightening walls, moving hair, and the like. You can also use Puppet Warp to do major alterations to the photo, such as repositioning arms and legs.

To use Puppet Warp, the section you wish to manipulate must be in a layer other than the default Background Layer.

For example, to turn the Mona Lisa’s smile into a frown:

1. Open the photo in Photoshop (Puppet Warp is a feature in CS 5 and newer).
   
2. Change the Background into a regular layer (Layer > New > Layer from Background).
3. Select the portion you wish to warp (in this case, the smiling area).
   
4. On the Edit menu, select Puppet Warp.
5. In the meshed area, click to select the “joints” you will use to warp the photo.
   
6. Drag the “joints” to manipulate the photo until you achieve the desired result:
   

Tags: image editing, photoshop, puppet warp

This entry was posted on Friday, May 11th, 2012 at 3:32 pm and is filed under image editing, photoshop. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.