We're All Puppets

Aside from "Content Aware Fill", the other big new bright shining function in Adobe Photoshop CS5 is called "Puppet Warp". View the demonstration video below for the wowee zowee but it essentially allows you greater flexibility in automatically manipulating imagery.

Automatic for the people:


Pretty nifty, yeh?

Well, even more so than in the Content Aware Fill demos, this Puppet Warp demo offers ideal fodder to manipulate. Which is fine: it more clearly demonstrates the possibilities.

But what can you do with a more complex image, with the absolute LEAST amount of skill and effort...?

Glad you asked.

As I'm sure most people are doing once they get their dirty little hands on CS5, I'm experimenting with photos I've had for ages. This is one I scanned in from a traditional photograph, over a DECADE ago:

If he looks familiar to you, it's actor Zachary P. Taylor who I actually went to college with back in the day! (It's true!!)

There are a few striking reasons this is a more complicated photograph to manipulate:
1) The background is cluttered, with no large, repeating patterns.
2) His legs are crossed.
3) He's got one hand in his pocket. (And the other one is hailing a taxi cab.)
4) Ethics.

All well and good—you say, —but what's it going to be, then, eh?

Animated GIF.
(Did you honestly have to ask...?)

This one, admittedly, took a few minutes.

In addition to "Puppet Warp", I used one quick pass of our new best friend "Content Aware Fill" along with some old cheap standard cutting-and-pasting trick ponies. The idea being NOT to make the BEST photo manipulation possible using Photoshop CS5 but to make the FASTEST photo manipulation possible. Using cutting edge cheap tricks.

In honor of this method, I'm calling this latest animated gif masterpiece...


"I Want You to Want Me"...


To be clear, I probably haven't seen Zach since 1995 or 1996—just in case you might be suspecting that I painstakingly recreated the photo with Zach and merely took several pictures of him posing in different positions. I understand why you would suspect this because the end result is so startlingly, uncannily photorealistic. Rest assured, I just used Photoshop and an animated gif program to produce this spectacle. (I'm not even sure that Zach's still alive, or that he still calls himself "Zach Taylor".)

Oh, we have fun.

THE FINAL WORD:
I like CS5 a lot. It makes some remarkable advances and includes plenty of fun new toys to help betray the trust of the world at large. I've no doubt that CS10 will include a function to automatically render images of dreams you had the night before. And CS20 is obviously destined to become fully sentient before it learns a method to erase humanity from the planet. So say we all.