Wave of the Past (Page 2)

Photoshop 6.0 Tutorial by Russell Brown

About the Author Russell Brown is the Sr. Creative Director for Adobe Systems, Inc. These tutorials come from Russell Brown's "Adobe Photoshop 6.0 Tips and Techniques" CD. Visit www.russellbrown.com for more tips and special events!

Related Resources • Wave of the Future • Photoshop Tutorials

Adobe ‘s flag bearer of digital imaging, Russell Preston Brown, leads the way with the Displace filter and Adobe Photoshop 6.0.

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7. And here’s where the fun starts! Choose Filter > Distort > Displace. It is now your job to determine how much horizontal and vertical scaling you want to use in your image. You will need to experiment, but after much advanced testing, I know that the magic numbers for my image are 8% and 8%. The displacement map we created is exactly the same size as our image, so the other options will not make a difference.

8. After we click OK, a dialog box prompts us for our displacement map. Find and select your displacement map and click Open.

Hint
Under Preferences > Saving Files, be sure to select the Maximize Backward Compatibily In Photoshop Format option. This will ensure that your displacement map works correctly.

9. There it is! You’ve created warped and distorted text based on the the grayscale values of your displacement map.

10. The final step in this process is to switch the layer mode to the appropriate mode for your project. In my case, I’ve selected Darken. Your results will depend on the color and the contrast between the two layers. Try different options to see which gives you the best results.

Displace filter used

11. In conclusion, if we compare the results of this classic distortion technique with those created with the new Liquify option, we can see some clear differences. First, it’s obvious that the Displace filter does a very clean mathematical distortion, but it lacks the subtleties that you can achieve when you paint the distortion with the Liquify tool. Perhaps the best results might be achieved by using both tools!

Liquify option used

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Visit www.russellbrown.com for more tips and special events!

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