From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

893 The Photoshop 2020 freeform Warp enhancements

From the course: Deke's Techniques (2018-2021)

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893 The Photoshop 2020 freeform Warp enhancements

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- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to "Deke's Techniques: The Stuck-at-Home Days." Today, we're inside Photoshop, where we'll be talking about custom distortions. And no, I don't mean Liquefy. Now, don't get me wrong, the Liquefy filter is great for brushing in distortions and editing faces. It even goes so far as to offer a mesh, which it uses to track your edits. But it doesn't give you any direct control over that mesh the way you have in, say, Illustrator, which is why for years now, I've been lobbying Adobe to the point of drawing up diagrams, this kind of storyboard of the user experience, for a feature that would actually let us create a custom mesh, set points, and move those points around not in a filter preview, but in the actual image window, with absolute control. And with Photoshop 2020, Adobe has finally done exactly that. In development, they called this Quilt Warp. Now, they call it Warp enhancements. All right, so the name is meh, but the feature itself is amazing! Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, so here's the final version of our very dramatic landscape, thanks to our ability to apply a custom warp inside Photoshop 2020 and moving forward. And here's the original multi-image panorama, which to my eye is fairly drab. It also happens to look extremely stretched. Notice that we have these very low-slung mountains right here. They should just be spiking like crazy, as we're seeing in the final image. So the first step is to go ahead and squish the image horizontally, and you can do that by going up to the Image menu and choosing the Image Size command. And then, if you're working along with me, go ahead and set your units of measure to pixels, and you want the Resample check box to be turned on, by the way, and your interpolation method should be set to Bicubic Smooth Gradients. That's always going to give you the best results in Photoshop. Do not go with Automatic, which is going to sharpen the transitions, which is not what we want. So I'll choose, once again, Bicubic Smooth Gradients, and then I'll turn off this link between the Width and Height value, so we can modify the values independently, and I'll change the Width value to 3920. You may wonder why that is, it just happens to work well inside our videos. And then I'll tab my way to the Height value and change it to 2520, and then I'll go ahead and click OK, and that goes ahead and scales the image as we're seeing right here. And so, because this is a nonproportional scale, we're making the mountains a little bit taller, but they should be taller still. And so, first thing I'm going to do is go over here to the Layers panel and double-click on this flat background in order to convert it to a floating layer, and I'll go ahead and name this layer Ushuaia, which is the southernmost city in the world, and I'll click OK, and we now have a floating layer, like so. All right, now, what you want to do is go up to the Edit menu and choose Free Transform, or you can press Control + T here on the PC or Command + T on the Mac, in order to enter the Free Transform mode, which, as it is, is going to allow us to scale and rotate the image, like so. I don't want to do either of those things. Fortunately, here inside Photoshop 2020 and later, we now have multiple undos inside Free Transform, so I'll go ahead and press Control + Z, or Command + Z on the Mac, a couple of times to undo those changes. And then, I'm going to switch to the custom warp mode, either by clicking on this little icon up here in the options bar, so that's one option, or you can just right-click inside the image window and choose Warp, and that will take you into the custom warp mode. Now, by default, you can drag a corner handle in order to stretch the image onto itself, like you're creating a kind of folded-page effect, which is pretty cool. You can also drag these control handles if you like in order to modify the curvature. I don't want to do either of those things, however, and so I'll press Control + Z, or Command + Z on the Mac, a couple of times to undo those changes. Notice that we have these split options up here in the options bar. So notice if I select this guy, Split the Warp Vertically, then, when I move my cursor into the image window, I am seeing a kind of vertical guide line, and I can go ahead and set that anywhere I like, like so, and now, we have additional points and control handles to work with. Now, I don't want anything like that, so I'll press Control + Z, or Command + Z on the Mac, a couple of times once again. The point is, I'm creating a kind of custom grid, and I can add to that grid by selecting this guy, Split the Warp Horizontally, and then I might move my cursor to very close to this horizon line. Notice how very bent it is right now, just sits there and swells in the center, about here, and so I'll just go ahead and create a guide above that just so I an keep my eye on what's going on. Now, if you want to create both a horizontal and a vertical split at the same time, then you would select this guy, the first of the split icons, or you can press and hold the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, which allows you to create a split on the fly. And so I'm going to create one, let's say, down here, just so I can really stretch those mountains. And notice if I keep the Alt or Option key down, I can continue to create more of these splits. Now, if you just want to add a horizontal or vertical split, then you hover your cursor over one of the existing ones. So if you hover over a vertical split, like so, then you're going to create a horizontal guy, and I want it to be, let's say, right about there, and if I press the Alt key, or the Option key on a Mac, while hovering over a horizontal split, as you see me doing right here, then I can create a vertical one. All right, and I want to create just one more horizontal split, above this building right here should work out nicely. All right, now that I have all my splits in place, all of these kind of warp guides, I'll go ahead and release the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, and then I'll zoom out in order to take in more of the image. And now you can drag these guys to any location that you like. However, you're going to have more control if you drag a bunch of guides at the same time, so I'll once again undo those changes, and I'll press Control + Minus or Command + Minus again in order to zoom out. Now, if you want to select multiple points, then you Shift + click on them like so. If you want to select an range of points in a row, then go ahead and click off the points to deselect them, and then press the Shift key and drag a marquee. So you can't just marquee the points, you have to press the Shift key and marquee them like so. And now, notice I can drag any one of these selected points in order to scale the sky upward. So really, I'm just scaling this region between the top of the image and this first row of points. All right, now, I'll click off the points again to deselect 'em, and I'll Shift + marquee this next row of points like so, and I'll drag any one of them upward in order to dramatically scale those mountains. Now, I also want you to notice that if you hover your cursor over an edge, then you can scale these points, and when I say that, I mean I'm scaling the selected points independently of the deselected ones. All right, I don't really want to do that, however, so I'm going to move those guys in. Don't move too far in, however, because then you'll reveal transparency in the background, so you'll just run out of imagery. So we want to go ahead and scale these guys back out a little bit. And then, I'm going to Shift + click on this point and this one to deselect them, and I'm going to drag these points downward, like so, in order to reduce the amount of stretching in the sky. All right, now I'll click off the points to deselect them all, and I'll Shift + marquee these guys down here, and I'll drag one of the interior points so I don't end up scaling anything, although, actually, I think, just in the name of safety here, I'll go ahead and scale these guys outward, 'cause I want to make sure that we don't have any transparency being revealed in the background. Then I'll click off the points and Shift + marquee these guys and go ahead and drag them down so that we have less stretching in the grass. And I'm going to grab this guy independently, but I can't really just click on it to select it, I have to click off the points to deselect them and then click on this guy to select him, and I'll go ahead and drag him outward like so, and I'll go ahead and drag this guy out as well. All right, so what if you want a little more control over things? You want a constraint. For example, I just want to take this next row and move it either up or down, then I'll click off the points to deselect them. That's not working in this case because I have just one point selected. So I'll Shift + marquee these guys. That adds that row to the selected point, so I'll go ahead and Shift + click on it to deselect them, and now notice if I press Shift + Down Arrow, I can move these points down in increments of 10. And so you can press Shift along with any arrow key you like in order to move things around. You can also press the arrow keys by themselves if you want to move the points in smaller increments. All right, I'm going to go ahead and scale this guy out. Click off the points to deselect 'em, click on this one, and Shift + click on this one in order to drag them down, because I want to make this lump of a hill in the foreground a little smaller than it was in the first place. You also have, by the way, the ability to rotate your points if you like just by dragging outside of that marquee right there. I want to move it more like this, so I'm just going to go ahead and kind of distort the city right here so it bends a little bit. That road was already bending in the first place, but I just want to emphasize this tree area right here in the foreground and this tree at the expense of this hill, which I really don't want to see, not to this extent, anyway. And so you can drag individual points if you want to, to any location you like. All right, now, notice that we've got this crooked horizon line. I can solve some of this problem by dragging this guy down. I can also go ahead and twist that horizon line by dragging a control handle, and so I might come up with something a little bit along these lines right here, maybe drag this control handle outward, in order to come up with this final effect. And if you think you've gone too far with the mountains, obviously, you just click off the points to deselect 'em. That actually didn't work, that guy's still selected, so you need to keep an eye on things. And so I'll Shift + drag across these two points right here, and then notice that the other point's not selected any more, so that's great. And so now, I can just drag these guys down, or I can nudge them, once again, from the keyboard, either by pressing an arrow key, or, if I want bigger movements, I would press Shift with an arrow key. And finally, I'm going to go ahead and drag this point outward a little bit in order to stretch this mountain so the curve is occurring right there on that edge, and I'll go ahead and drag this guy outside as well, just so we're not leaving any transparency in the background. When you're done, you can switch back to the standard Transform mode if you want to by clicking on this Warp icon, and that will allow you to scale and rotate the image if you like. In my case, I don't want to, I just want to accept my change, either by clicking on this check mark up here in the options bar, or you can press the Enter key here on the PC, or the Return key on the Mac. Now, I'll just go ahead and zoom in so that we can take in the entire image. In fact, I'll just go ahead and press Shift + F in order to switch to the full-screen mode. And just so you can see what we were able to accomplish using this very powerful Warp enhancement feature, this is the image as it appeared after I got done scaling it, so this is the one that's squished horizontally, and this is the image as it appears now, thanks to a feature that was originally known as Quilt Warp and is now known as Freeform Warp enhancements here inside Photoshop 2020 and moving forward. All right, so that's awesome, but it's also destructive, you know, permanent? Which is why if you're a member of LinkedIn Learning, I have a follow-up movie in which I show you how to warp an image nondestructively with the help of a Smart Object, so that you can edit the effect any time you like. Meanwhile, if you're looking forward to next week, I'm going to show you how to create this photographic painting right here, which is nothing more than a combination of a couple of frames from a very mediocre GoPro movie that I shot underwater in Antarctica. Garbage in, gorgeous out, that's the "Deke's Techniques" promise! "Deke's Techniques," each and every week. Keep watching.

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