First thing you need to do is create a new image that is large enough for you to place your photo on with a little room to spare around the edges. Here I have a white layer and a layer that has my photo image on it in the center.
When warping a photo you will notice that pixels can be degraded, you can reduce the amount of the degradation by increasing the number of point on your mesh. The shorter the distance you have to move the pixels the less they will become distorted.
Note: When dragging the mesh points, hold down the Shift key to move a row of points equally. Hold down the Ctrl key (*see mouse icon in image below) to smoothly curve a column or row. Drag individual points to limit the warp effect to a specific area of the image.
Tips:
1. A symmetric mesh keeps the number of horizontal and vertical points even.
2. Get your mesh columns and rows as close as you can to concentrate mainly on the area you want to warp. I have a row directly above my frame and directly below my frame. I don’t want the warp to affect too much of my photo image, as it will distort my picture.
3. You can select any other tool in the tool bar so that the mesh lines and points go away and you can visually see your image clearer. Then just reselect the mesh warp and the lines will be where you last left them and you can continue on with your warping.
4. Click apply, when you are happy with your warp.
Here are the settings I used on my image, however your horizontal and vertical number will vary depending on the size of your photo image.
Next we will create our drop shadow on a new layer.
Make sure you have Shadow on new layer checked. Then activate your mesh warp to your shadow layer. In the image below I used the Crtl key while using the center most point to push the drop shadow up in the center. Then moving over to a farther point to the left I again used the Crtl key and pulled the row downward, doing the same thing to the farther right point. The warp will be most noticeable directly on the center of whichever point you grab…so is you grab a point farther away from the area you want to affect, the curve will lessen in (ex: the center part) of the shadow on the photo. If you follow this tutorial and experiment with the Crtl key and move points selecting first one on the left then the center and then one farthest to the right you will see for yourself what I am talking about.
Here are the settings I used for my photo’s drop shadow.
See how my row of points is NOT even on the bottom row, what I did was to carefully move individual points to create a more pronounced drop shadow to the two corner areas by pulling them downward one at a time.
Here is my final effect of bending a photo and keeping the drop shadow flat against the background.
*First Published in Tidbytes Ezine January 2007*
© Copyright by Scrapbook-Bytes.com
Top of Page
