retouch

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 »