Photoshop CS5 is has already been announced and most of us are thinking is it worth the upgrade? Well today I will show you one less-talked-about feature that we’ve been using in a production setting for the last month and that has been a real time saver for me – the Puppet Warp.

Puppet Warp tool has a lot of cool uses like character or object posing on the scene (as seen in this video), however what I found really useful is Puppet Warp’s ability to tweak the image without any visible distortion that usually occurs when using warp, scale or smudge tools. Just to give a very quick example of what I mean, I will demonstrate how you can add a nicer smile on my portrait image I took a while ago for my Facebook profile.

Disclaimer: I am no way affiliated with Adobe Systems Inc. or getting “rewarded” for this article, I was just happy to discover a feature in CS5 that I really seem to like and I want to share it with you.

Here’s the original image I took:

Let’s choose Edit -> Puppet Warp

The Puppet Warp mesh appears over non-transparent parts of the layer, in our case it covers all the portrait:

When we click on the image, yellow control points appear. Let’s position those points on (or near) the main features we want to keep in place when modifying the image – think of them as pins on a flexible garment:

When working with detailed images, you will want to increase the mesh density for more precise results and less visible distortion, this can be done by choosing an option from the Density menu:

Now let’s drag the control points to tweak the image to your liking, like so:

When done, hit Return key on the keyboard and behold the final result:

This is a comparison of the two images side by side:

And this is a close up of detail, you can clearly see that no detail or texture was lost in the process and the image still looks very natural. All of this in less than 60 seconds with the new CS5!

Amazing, isn’t it? What do you think about it? Please leave your comments in the comment section below and follow me on twitter for more fun stuff!

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 25th, 2010 at 1:52 pm and is filed under CS5, General, Tutorial. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.