Tenacious Creations

  Let’s face it, most of us use photo shop because it is fun. The other day at work a colleague and I were discussing how one would manipulate a picture of an apple to make it square. So thought “What the heck I’ll do a tutorial on it.”. So lets’ get started.

  Well first you are going to need a picture of a piece of fruit, or an object you want to change the shape of. In order to find the picture of an apple that I am going to use, I used googles
image search. You are looking for an apple with white back ground, or some other back ground that is going to be easy to remove. Once you have found your desired image and removed the back ground you can continue on with the tutorial.

• So open up the your image that you have removed the back ground from in photoshop. Keeping this image open, go to File > New and create a new image. Make it larger than your source picture to give you some extra room and select white background for background contents.


 

• Use the select tool to drag your image (in this case an apple) to your new image and place it somewhere in the center.
• Photoshop will automatically create a new layer when you drag your apple to the new image. Now we are going to draw some guide lines in order to make our apple square. Create a new layer.
• Choose a color that’s not going to interfere with your image. I like to use red, but use what ever you are comfortable with. Make sure on the top menu you have the Fill Pixels icon selected   and draw a 3D box around your apple. Don’t get too worried if it is not perfect, we are only going to use it for a guide.

• Now turn off the background layer by clicking on the eye icon. Select the layer with your apple on it. I went ahead and renamed this layer apple.
• From the filter menu choose liquify. When the liquify filter screen appears you may have to zoom in on your apple to make it easier to work with.

• Now on the Liquify screen you’ll want to change the following options.
  1. Make sure Show Backdrop is selected.
  2. Change the Use tab to the layer where your 3D box is.
  3. Change the Opacity to about 50%.
  

• Now using the warp tool we can begin to shape the apple. If you click on the image below, you can see a short clip on how I used the warp tool to both push the apple out to the box and into the box.

• Don’t worry if you make a mistake. If you want to undo something you have done use the Reconstruct Tool and it will do just that - reconstruct your image.
• You may encounter places where you just can’t seem to make it warp and still look good. In this case you can use the Bloat Tool . This will (you guessed it) bloat the image. Another useful tip is to use as big of a brush as will work, this tends to give you better edges.
• Once you are satisfied with your shaping of the apple. Select Ok and the filter will render its results. You could stop here but we can make it look a little better by adding some highlights along the square edges.
• Use the Eyedropper and select an area where the color is a good representative of the color of the entire apple.
• Double click the new color picked and the color picker will come up. Now choose a color to the left of the one selected so it will have more white in it. Select the paint brush, and choose a small, soft brush with an opacity close to 60%. make a New layer. Take this brush and paint lines where the edges of the apple should be.




• Now using the eraser, remove some of the harshness of the lines and make them look more natural.



• Now I like to turn the background layer back on. You do this by clicking on the box where the eye ball should be. Then I select the layer I put my highlights on and adjust the opacity until they blend into the light.





• At this point you can call it done, depending on if you are going to use this square apple in another image. At this point I add a bit of shadow. To see how click here.

 This techniques are not just limited to fruit, and vegetables. You can apply them on just about anything, pets people. let your imagination free and see what you can come up with.

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