Pioneer Spirit

Thanks again to Marcus for his present­a­tion yes­terday! The Show Back­drop trick with the box guide layer was really clever—I have never thought of trying that, so it was good to see.

The PDF that I referred to during the ses­sion can be down­loaded here (1MB PDF). As I was saying, it is a really good intro­duc­tion into the use of the tool, and is spe­cific­ally geared towards image retouching. There is some inform­a­tion in the tutorial regarding the ppi/mesh trick that I showed you—I think that it is a much better tech­nique than simply making a selec­tion prior to invoking the tool.

The tutorial was written by Chris Tarantino, an extremely exper­i­enced image retoucher. He is cur­rently in the pro­cess of pro­du­cing a training DVD that we will review as soon as we can. His blog has more inform­a­tion about the DVD if you are interested.

Remember that when using Liquify to enhance images of people:

• If you are drastic­ally altering the struc­ture of the image, it is easy to des­troy the tex­ture within the image (in this case skin tex­ture). This will make the image look unreal­istic. Min­imize this problem by applying the Liquify filter more than once, ensuring that with each applic­a­tion you do not move pixels too far. This will pro­tect the tex­ture better than trying to dis­tort the image in one pass.
• Set the Brush Size as high as pos­sible, to more subtly refine edges.
• Set Brush Density, Brush Pres­sure, and Brush Rate very low (a good starting point for all three values is 10)—it is important that the tools within the Liquify inter­face do not respond too quickly, or you will have no con­trol over their effects.
• Finally, if you would like to use a slider to refine how much of a change you would like to make to an area, click on the Recon­struct Options fly–out menu button, and choose Revert… I prefer to use this method instead of the Recon­struct tool, because it provides me with greater control.

The example that I showed, of using the Liquify filter to create an illus­trative wood tex­ture, can be seen in episode 21 of Bert Monroy’s PixelP­er­fect pod­cast, if you would like a re–cap.

See you all next week, Lee : )

This post is tagged Filters, Illustration, Image Retouching, Liquify, Plugins