Photo of the Week - Week 32

This week's post highlights one of the fun tools in Photoshop - Puppet Warp. Just the name sounds cool, doesn't it? It's one of those amazing tools that lets you manipulate the image and do some pretty incredible things. My example from today is a subtle one that I used in a recent portrait, well, portrait by accident.

I had been asked to take some portraits of the Young Women's group at Church and while I was setting up for that, another family asked me to shoot a couple of photos for them.

Anyway, here's one of the pictures; since I was firing off quickly (and wasn't thinking about doing portraits for them) I got one image of this brother and sister, but her expression is less than ideal. In fact, she looks like she's about ready to say something really nasty to me. Not really the case - a super nice family, but just bad timing on my part:

Of course, I only had one image of these two together. In the other images, she is facing the wrong way, so I couldn't just swap faces. Enter Puppet Warp!

Puppet Warp analyzes the image and sets a mesh grid over the whole thing. You set pins to "hold in place" portions of the image and then essentially click and drag it around to move parts of the image selectively. In this case, I just wanted a subtle smile as opposed to the grimace above. Here's what I ended up with:

The final image also has a few other things done to it - cropping, removed some blemishes, etc. This is the first time I've used Puppet Warp, other than goofing around and making some wacky pictures. Again, not a perfect expression above - best would have been to notice the grimace and retake the photos - but in this case that wasn't possible and this helped salvage a photo.