Photoshop Techniques: "Liquify"

Under Photoshop's filters, there is a photo-fixer called "Liquify." Basically it allows you to take a photo and completely manipulate it. This means you can make parts of the picture bigger or smaller, swirl areas of the picture, shift parts of the picture, and so much more.

In the following pictures, I'll be showing a couple of examples of what you can do with the Liquifying technique (plus a few of my other photoshop go-to's I use in many pictures)

In these two pictures, you can see how the arms & waist area of the young woman look smaller in the one below. That was done by liquifying & using the warp tool within that. (There are several tools to choose from when you're in the Liquify screen)
Other adjustments made to the picture include brightening using levels, sharpening parts of the picture, and gaussian blurring the background of the photo.

It takes a lot of time (especially at first) but through Liquifying a picture, you can achieve almost any effect you can imagine...

In the following photos, I'm going to show how even a facial expression can be changed [slightly] and still look real. (The only other photoshopping to the pictures below is that parts of the face have been dodged to make the shaddows less obvious and the levels have been adjusted to make the photo brighter & better colored)

The original

By using the liquify tool, I raised her eyebrows up and widened the eyes. Then I adjusted the curve of her mouth and cheeks to make it appear that she's almost smiling.

I then also took the bandaid tool to erase a couple of her cheek lines. This made her look even closer to happy.

The one thing we must be careful not to do when liquifying is to go too far...

You can see what I mean in this photo:
From a distance it doesn't look too bad, but if you click on it (to see it bigger & up close) it looks completely fake.

There is no "STOP!" signal that photoshop will give us to keep a photo from being overprocessed, so be careful. We'll re-visit overprocessing again soon & touch on other areas where this is easy to do as well.