How to Use Puppet War in Photoshop Tutorial
Hey CAFE crew, it's Colin Smith here and this
week, I'm going to show you how to transform
yourself into another person?
Hey everyone, I'm Karen from Storyart and
I'm here to take over from Colin and show
you how to use the Puppet Warp Tool.
All right, so I'm here to show you the Puppet
Warp Tool and there's some really cool tricks
that you can do with this. I've got a giraffe
here that I'd like to show you how you can
move the neck, the legs everything independently,
like you're operating a puppet.
So, I'm in here, I've got my giraffe that
I have already cut out and extracted, and
I have rasterized that just for the purpose
of making this quicker for you to see, but
you can do this as a mask as well. So if you
have a layer mask on your object, then you
can do this Puppet Warp in the same way.
So, Puppet Warp is found in Edit, and Puppet
Warp. There you'll find, when you bring this
up, the default settings are Mode, Normal;
Density, Normal; and Expansion, 2 pixels.
Now, if you'll leave it on the default settings,
you will encounter some problems.
I'm going to show you that very quickly first,
before I go into the detail on how to use
Puppet Warp. So the first thing that I'll
do is just make some movement. So, by creating
some pins on our giraffe, I won't put too
many here yet because I just want to show
you what actually happens when you use the
default settings.
So I'm going to move my giraffe down, bring
the neck down, as you can see, pretty cool
feature to be able to do that, but I'll click
Apply. Now when I zoom up on this change,
you can see in some areas that there are some
jagged edges, and that is because the pixels
were set to 2 pixels, so the expansion was
set to 2 pixels, which was too close to the
edge of the giraffe.
So you'll find that's an issue and I actually
had this problem for a while and I finally
figured out how to fix that. So I'm here to
tell you right now how you can do that as
well. So let's go backwards and we'll go back
into our Puppet Warp settings, Edit, Puppet
Warp.
Now, you can see here, as I said, the expansion
was set to 2 pixels. I'm going to change that
to 20 pixels. And what that does is it brings
the edge of the mesh outside of our giraffe,
which leaves space, and it means that it doesn't
create those jagged edges that you saw before.
Okay, now that I've got my draft set up and
the Expansion is set to 20 pixels, which gives
us space around the giraffe, you can change
the density. Now, at the moment, it's on Normal,
and that will work quite well for our giraffe
here. If you have a very basic object, you
could change that to fewer points, which means
there's fewer points on the mesh, so fewer
places that you can place the pins, and less
movement.
If you wanted to change it to more points,
that will be great if you have some fine detail
that you need to change. For example, if you're
playing with hands and fingers, and you need
to move fingers independently, and they're
very close together, I would change it to
Density, More Points, but for our giraffe,
we are going to stick with Normal, and then,
we're going to add our points.
Now you can change the Mode as well and that's
something that I will show you once I've added
the points. So now that we've got our mesh
set up, we can just use this pin which comes
up when you're actually in the Puppet Warp
Tool and click on the different areas of our
giraffe. And we're going to start with the
fit and add pins.
Now if I add one pin to the head, now that
I've locked down the feet, and move that around,
you can see that the feet are staying in place,
but the rest of the giraffe is moving. Now,
if I want to actually lock down the body,
I need to add more pins, so I would add a
pin at the neck, at the top of the tail, at
the base of the tail, at the knees, and at
the hip.
Now, if I move the head by just clicking on
that pin at the head and moving it around,
we can now see that the rest of the giraffe
is locked down. If I want to move the feet,
I can do the same thing. The rest of the giraffe
is locked down and I'm able to move just one
foot independently.
You'll notice that as I move the pin of the
foot here, it curves a little bit. If I want
to keep that actually quite straight, you
can change the Mode. So we have Rigid, Normal,
and Distort. So if we actually change the
Mode in Puppet Warp to Rigid, it keeps that
area much straighter and you have more control
over the shape of your Puppet Warp, so that
works well with legs.
Now the other mode that you can change to
is Distort and what is cool about this is
that you can change the perspective of your
animal. So we can actually move the head this
way and it looks like the giraffe is coming
towards us, like a wide angle shot, so the
perspective changes with Distort. So that
can be a great option if you're needing to
add some distortions to just one area of your
object. You can actually use that, pin the
rest of the object, and bring that further
forward, or bring that further back, okay.
So now that we've got our giraffe ready to
move, we're going to go back to Normal and
just make a few changes, so let's bend the
giraffe's head down like that. We'll move
the feet, put this foot up in the air and
further forward, and we move the back foot
up off the air like he's walking.
I want to add another point there, and we'll
move the tail up in the air a little bit as
well, just for fun. Now we just need to hit
apply, and now you can see we've got our distorted
giraffe, and if we zoom nice and close, we
can see that all of the details were retained,
so having the Expansion out to 20 pixels means
that we keep all of the detail of our front
cut out that we've spent so long doing earlier
on.
So I hope that you enjoyed this tutorial on
Puppet Warp and if you liked this, and you
like to check more of my work, it's at StoryArt.com.au
and I also have a tutorial up on the PhotoshopCAFE
website, which is Compositing Secrets in Photoshop,
the Story Art Method, so make sure you go
and check that out.
Don't forget to subscribe to this channel,
Like, and Comment. Until next time, see you
at the CAFE.
