Liquify

In today's technique, I show you how to create starbursts. Not those boring starbursts that contain text messages like "New!" or "Improved!" or "Pow!" But custom stars that are literally bursting at the seams, much like flares, blasts, and explosions in the real world. All with no more than a star-shaped path outline, a few effects, and Adobe Illustator.

Here's the official description from lynda.com: Read more » 

Photoshop is famous, if not downright notorious, for its ability to distort reality. Which is ironic given that most of us whose job it is to distort reality are frustrated by Photoshop’s meager collection of reality-distortion tools. I mean, there’s Liquify, there’s the Warp command . . . there’s Liquify. I ask you, where are all the fabulously terrifying distortion tools? 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 »