distort

This week I take a photo of an everyday average woman screaming her brains out and double-map her onto a photograph of shattered glass (both from the Fotolia image library). Is she singing so loudly she breaks a mirror? Or is she a photo stuck behind the glass, shouting to get out? I ask those questions twice more inside the video, so please enjoy my repetition. Read more » 

The Liquify filter is one of Photoshop's great destructive retouching tools. (Of which we'll see more before this countdown is out.) Meaning that it permanently modifies pixels--no fancy parametric adjustments for this one!--in the name of making the subject of your photograph look her or his best.

Notice that I positioned the feminine pronoun first; that was not by accident. These days, Liquify is used to tweak virtually every professional glamor shot on the planet. It is, in fact, the Auto-Tune of professional portrait photography. So much so that, during a presentation by a notorious photographer and retoucher, an equally notorious female colleague of mine leaned over and whispered, "If he takes one more anorexic model and turns her into a stick figure, I'm going to go up there and kick him in the f*cking nuts." Read more »