Create Sinister Looks With The Liquify Filter

The Liquify filter can make any image like putty, allowing you to radically change the way an image looks. But a light touch here and there can turn a simple portrait shot into a sinister glare. I had the opportunity recently to put Liquify to good use.

Figure 1: Graham Cook.

Figure 1 is Graham Cook, President and CEO of Homesteaders Life Company, where I spend my mornings designing. He’s a decent fellow, but I got a request to put him on one of those Western-style “Wanted” posters for a company-wide party. For me it was a great opportunity to use some weathered textures, Old West woodtypes and a bit of creative copywriting but the best part was making Graham into a dastardly rapscallion.

I always look for ways to retouch facial gestures when setting a mood in situations like these, because even very subtle changes will read loudly on a face. I decided I had to slant the eyebrows and make the austere mouth into a real scowl. The Liquify filter (you’ll find it in the Filter menu on CS and CS2, or I believe it’s the Edit menu in versions 6 and 7) is a high-octane version of the old Smear Tool that looked like a finger and let you move pixels around like you were finger-painting. I’m not sure it was called the Smear Tool, but old-time users will remember the finger icon. Anyway, Liquify has a lot more features and is a lot more complicated, but just using the default tool and settings will let you move entire components of an image around, and is especially effective on facial features like a mouth’s corners and eyebrows.

Figure 2: Villain!

Figure 2 is the retouched version of Graham, and he looks a whole lot meaner. The Liquify filter has a brush-like interface so it’s a matter of clicking on the area you want to affect and dragging in the direction you want the pixels to move. In this case I dragged the corners of the mouth downward and parts of the eyebrows downward as well. Graham’s glasses made it next to impossible to do it exactly right, but it was all for fun so I didn’t mind that the glasses were warped to match his evil eyebrows.

Figure 3: Wanted!

Figure 3 shows you the final product, the wanted poster. Graham was given a handlebar mustache, a chilling nickname (“Bobo”?) and a reward that I suppose in 1877 might have been worth something. If you’re interested in more details on the Liquify filter (it’s one of the hardest filters to master) or would like to see other major retouching work like this, drop me a line and tell me what you want to see!