Liquid Measures

In our last feature, "More About Smoothing," we made the following statement:

To those who say the person's face doesn't really look like that, we say, "Harsh reality is not what our clients are looking for when they hire a photographer.  People have their own built-in filters that remove nearly all blemishes from their memories of a face.  Our photography should capture those memories, not the harsh details."

That statement is a firm belief of ours.  It was reinforced a week ago when we received a thank-you card from a client who said we had worked miracles, and she was so very grateful.  (She is a company executive who had requested head shots for their brochure.)  Today we'll talk about the Photoshop techniques used to adjust the image we created for her:

   

The first steps are simple:

You can see the improvement in the hair, turtleneck, and facial details.  Now we want to focus on the use of Photoshop's Liquify tool.  Select a reasonably small area that contains the portion to be altered and press Shift-Ctrl-X (or click on Filter/Liquify...) 

Of the tools available on the toolbar, the top one (Forward Warp) is probably the most-often used.  But the two most important tools in the Liquify arsenal are the Freeze Mask and Thaw Mask tools are near the bottom.  Since you will be using a pretty wide brush in order to get a smooth, gentle change, part of your brush will be moving over areas you don't want altered.  So freeze them, much like what is shown below:

Notice that the right side of the turtleneck is masked, as is the jaw line.  Only the portion inside the red mask can get altered, even though part of your brush might move over it.

To proceed, select the Forward Warp tool and enlarge your brush size until it's nearly as wide as the unprotected area inside the red mask.  Then place the center point of the brush about halfway down the neckline, close to where the neckline meets the turtleneck, and gently raise the neck up and left.  You should get a lovely arched curve.

If you don't like the results when you release the brush, place Ctrl-Z to undo.  Freeze a little more if you need to, or thaw with the Thaw Mask Tool.  If you want to completely start over, hold down the Alt (Option) key; the Cancel key will change to the Reset key, and you can click it and begin again.

Eventually you'll get something like you see above.  Yes, it's a very noticeable change if you study the two images carefully.  But the image on the right matches the one in her friends' and co-workers' memories.