Fun with Photoshop: The liquify filter

Sometimes it’s fun to goof around with Photoshop and have fun. Photoshop is well known for it’s image manipulation tools. You can do all sorts of interesting things from colour correction to merging different photos together. Some examples can be found on my old deviantArt account.

This kind of image manipulation can be time consuming and require a good grasp of Photoshop. There is however one very fun tool to play with that can yield very funny and satisfying results almost instantly. This is of course the Photoshop liquify filter. I highly recommend doing these manipulations on photos of co-workers, pets, family or even client photos you may be working on, but be very careful one doesn’t get back to said client. Maybe you should scratch client photos from the list just in case.

Huge goofy eyes

The method I will describe will yield similar results to the ones you see on the front of greeting cards with goofy looking animals and humongous eyes. Here is a picture of my cat before and after a simple encounter with the liquify filter.

This is very simple to do, start by going to the top menu and selecting:

Filter / Liquify … Shortcut: Shift+Ctrl+X

Once you are in the liquify window look for the bloat tool. Shortcut: B

Once you have the tool selected you will want the Brush Size slider to be about twice the diameter of the the eye Shortcut: ]. You can experiment with the size as different photos yield different results. I find that you get the best results by positioning the bloat brush directly in the center of the eye or on the eyes highlight. If you think you over did it you can click Reconstruct or the Restore All buttons located on the right. Reconstruct will take you back in steps slowly reducing the effects you have added. Restore All will undo all the editing you have done. You can also use the Reconstruction Tool (Shortcut: R) to restore any part of the photo manually. This is good if you have goofed on one eye, you can then restore just that eye with the Reconstruction Tool and try again.

There are a load of other tools you can play with in the liquify tools and I suggest playing around with all of them. For the opposite affect of the bloat tool, try the Pucker tool. You can also stretch and warp parts of your image. There are also the Freeze Mask and Thaw Mask tools; these are useful for keeping parts of the image from being effected by your manipulations.

Look at those teeth!

I couldn’t find a good photo of me smiling up close, so a quick search on Morguefile.com and I found this pretty girl smiling, who I then proceeded to transformed into a not so pretty girl smiling. This was done with a quick bloat on the teeth followed by a Sharpen and Blur and then using the Burn tool (found in the standard tools bar) on the teeth to give them that unbrushed look.

So next time you get bored or have time to burn and need a little laugh, fire up photoshop and play around with it.