From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Warping images - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Warping images

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- [Narrator] Photoshop's Warp tools are a great way to distort an image in order to composite it with another. I'll select the Object Selection Tool and then click on the corrugated metal in order to select it. Then I'm going to switch to the Move tool and then choose layer, new and then layer via copy. I want to create a copy of this metal so that I can use it as the base layer of a clipping mask once I distort the photo on top of it. In the layers panel, I'll target and make visible the photo layer, and then right click in order to convert it to a smart object. Then I'll choose edit, transform, and then scale and I'm going to scale this down so that it's a little bit smaller than the corrugated metal. Then I'll choose the distort option and drag the corners of the photo to the corners of the corrugated metal. It's okay if the image is a little bit larger because we will be using that layer one as our clipping mask. So switch to the warp tool, I'll click on the warp icon. By default, we'll have a grid overlay, but we can customize that grid using the dropdown. Here, I'll choose four by four, and now I can click and drag in the grid area in order to warp the image. I can also click on any of these anchor points and I can click and drag in order to rotate by using any of the direction lines. In fact, if I go to the corner, we can actually drag this so far that it looks like we can see the other side. All right, I'll use command + Z in order to undo that. If I wanted to add additional split lines, we can use these first three icons and then just click in the image. That can help us to gain additional control in a specific area of the image. For now, I want to add a custom number of grid lines, so I'll choose custom. Photoshop will warn me that it's going to discard the edits I've already made, but that's okay. So we'll make one column by 21 rows. And the reason that I chose that number is because that's how many curves there are in the corrugated metal. I'll use command + one in order to zoom into 100%, and then I'm going to adjust all of these anchor points so that they match the curve of the metal. So we'll just drag these out. I'm going to use the space bar in order to reposition or pan in my image so that I can see different areas. And I'm just going to make sure that these are fitting. Again, it's okay if we go a little bit outside because we're going to use that layer one as the clipping mask. All right, I'm just going to continue here with the other side. And I could hold down the shift key if I wanted to select more than one anchor point at a time. However, in this case, I need to position these all independently from one another, so we'll just do it like this. Excellent, to apply that, I'll click on the check mark. Of course, we applied that to a smart object, so at any time I could go back in and make changes as needed. For now, I'll use command + zero in order to zoom out and to make this look more realistic, I'm going to change the blend mode of the photo. So I'll select overlay from the blend modes, and I also want to make sure that it's only appearing on the corrugated metal, so I can use the layer menu and add a clipping mask. Now the photo will only show up where there's information on the layer below, which is the corrugated metal, but it's a little difficult to see the photograph, so I'm going to make a duplicate of it. I'll use layer, new and then layer via copy. I'll want to include this in the clipping mask, so I'll hold down the option Key on Mac or the Alt Key on Windows. When I see this icon, that will add it as part of the clipping mask. Then I'll change the blend mode back to normal, but decrease the opacity. I'll also just mention that because we converted the photo to a smart object, if we wanted to, we could actually replace the contents of the photograph and it would replace the contents not only of the photo, but also a copy because it's a duplicate of the smart object. So as you can see, Photoshop's Warp tools are a great way to distort images when compositing.

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