Liquify in PS it is similar, but IMHO, this is more controllable and a better tool, not the least of which because you are working in the actual layer, not a dialog. And, that you can actually SEE those controls, I find to be a major plus.

However, the very best part of all? That nifty little groovy thing that happens whenever we use the RIGHT mouse button over some of our previously warped material. Whoa mama. Which can also be controlled to undo at whatever rate of speed happens to float ones boat. Partially restoring a botched facelift with that RIGHT mouse button, is often a heck of a lot better than starting over again from scratch. Waaay cooler. :)

Yes, this is what I meant about more controllable. I learned some really amazing things that can be done with liquify from Bert Monroy and I've been playing with the warp tools to see how much of it can be reproduced via the new warp tools in PSP - answer? nearly all. I do like the "freeze" that liquify provides, but have a work around that works (make freehand selection and work within the selection) Maybe I should write a tutorial on how to create amazingly realistic wood grains and smoke effects from scratch using the warp tools -- stuff I initially learned mostly from him. -JP Kabala

There is no freeze or thaw brush. This is because the Warp tools are integrated into PSP and use the same concepts as any other tools, i.e. make a selection to restrict the effect of the tool. In PS you are stuck in a little filter without access to the rest of the app. We felt it was silly to replicate freeze and thaw and ruby liths in the PSP version. If anyone feels this was a bad decision I'd like to know.

TIP: There is one other way to use selections when you want to drag one part of the image over another part to cover it. For example, you want to stretch a nose so much it covers the lips and chin - Hello Pinocchio :)

Make a selection of what you wish to deform. Then do Promote To Layer and warp this new layer. Finally, if you want, merge the original and new layers together. -Kris

 

Warping and selection editing I was reminded of this by coming across a PS tutorial about Liquify. You can find the tutorial here. Now, it is mostly pretty familiar stuff that Porter has already alluded to earlier. The last part of the tutorial, however, concerns liquefying text. Some interesting things are possible. The best approach for now might be to put your text down as a selection and save with the selection active. Now you can open the image in PSP 8 and have a selection in the form of text. Having done so, you might want to put a little feather on the selection before continuing. Now for the cool part. Are you ready? Select the Warp Brush but don't use it yet. Next, go to Selections and press that Edit Selections toggle. Suddenly your selection fills with ruby lith. Now warp away to curve that text, twirl, expand and just plain noisify. Press Edit Selection again when you are done. The Warp Brush will do a final apply and now you have a nicely deformed selection that you can flood fill with whatever, bevel, sculpt and what have you. This should be the source of some new and cool text effects. By the way, that Edit Selection thing is useful in other ways. It works a lot like masking, except that now you can paint your selections on the image instead of using the selection tools. You can paint from scratch or you can modify existing selections. You can even apply filters to modify the selection, including effect filters, provided they will work on a greyscale image and don't require transparency. (Heck, you can use Balls And Bubbles or a Sunburst if you must :) You can rotate, deform and resize your selections too. Dragging around with the warp tools is only one way to do it. Other tools work too. You can even seamlessly tile a selection. Pretty useful isn't it? -Kris

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