Hi. Welcome back to the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com.
I'm Jesus Ramirez. In this video, I'm going to show you how to
expand and bend a building in Photoshop. You're going to learn a lot of new techniques,
so stick around to the very end. To extend a building, you're probably thinking
that we're going to use the Clone tool, but we're not.
We're instead going to use a technique that utilizes the Mixer Brush.
Then we're going to bend the building with the Puppet Warp tool.
Okay, let's get started.
This is the photo that we're going to work with.
You can follow along if you like with a free watermarked version from Adobe Stock.
You can, of course, license the image if you like,
or use your own photo.
The most important thing is that you learn the technique.
So, what we want to do in this tutorial is
take this building here on the left and expand it and bend it over the city.
And the first step is to figure out how we're going to expand the building.
There are several different ways in which you can do so, but I'm going to show you a
technique that I think you'll enjoy. So, first, I'm going to press the Z key on
the keyboard to zoom into this building, and we got to figure out what we want to duplicate.
So, on your image, look for repeatable patterns. In this case, the windows are repeatable patterns,
so that's what I'm going to focus on. And if you zoom in, you can see that the windows
have a highlight and then a shadow, so that's really what I'm going to be looking at when
deciding what to duplicate. So, I'm going to zoom out, and I'm going to
hold the space bar, click and drag to pan up.
Then I'm going to select the rectangular marquee tool, and I'm going to click on the edge of
the building and drag to the other side. Then with the space bar, you can click and
drag the selection as you create it. So, I'll drag up and place the top edge of
the selection just past the shadow, so that the shadow is inside of the selection, and
I'll place the bottom edge right over the shadow, so that the highlight is inside the selection.
And I'm just going to duplicate the pixels
within this part of the selection. And I'll explain in a moment why I'm doing this.
So, with this part of the building selected,
I'm going to press Ctrl J on Windows, Command J on the Mac, to duplicate these pixels.
And the reason that I use this shadow in the highlight was because you can find those shadows
and those highlights on all the windows, so I figure that will be a good reference point.
So, you can see the highlights and shadows
above all the windows.
And when I select the Move tool,
I can hold Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac,
and click and drag up to duplicate. And you can see how I'm just duplicating the
windows and making the building taller. Unfortunately, this is not the most efficient
way of expanding a building, so I'm going to undo that.
For those of you who are more advanced, you might consider using the transformation and
duplication technique. And although it would work, it's not ideal
for this. Actually, now that I've brought it up, let
me show you how that technique works. First, select your layer, then press Ctrl
J on Windows, Command J on the Mac to duplicate the layer.
Then you can load that layer as a selection by pressing Ctrl on Windows, Command on a
Mac, and clicking on the layer thumbnail to load that layer as a selection.
Then you can press Ctrl T on Windows, Command T on the Mac, and tap on the up arrow key
on the keyboard to move the layer up, and just stop until you reach the edge.
If you go over, no problem, just tap the down arrow key to go back down.
Then click on the check mark to commit the changes.
Photoshop will remember this last transformation, and you can keep repeating it and duplicating
it on the same layer by using a keyboard shortcut. Ctrl, Alt, Shift T on Windows, Command, Option,
Shift T on the Mac. Notice that as I continue to press that keyboard
shortcut, it expands my building. And that works pretty well, actually.
The downside is that it requires a lot of steps, and you have to keep pressing that
keyboard shortcut to make the building taller. So, instead, I'm going to show you a technique
that is more efficient, and that will help you in many different types of projects.
First, I'll delete this layer by dragging it into the trash icon, so that I only work
with the original layer we created. And what I'm going to do is zoom into it so
that we can clearly see it. And, I'm using the space bar to pan as I zoom
in, and the tool that I'm going to show you is the Mixer Brush tool.
There's a couple settings you have to remember. First, make sure that under this dropdown,
you uncheck load solid colors only. You enable this box, and make sure that you
have any of the dry settings, so dry, heavy load will work.
You don't want to have a wet brush, because that will mix your colors, and you don't want
to do that. If you want to know more about how these settings
work, then check out my tutorial on turning your photo into an oil painting.
I'll place a link right below in the description. For now, I'm just going to keep a dry brush.
And finally, make sure that uncheck sample all layers.
Then, you can hold Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac, and when you see the crosshair
icon, you can click to sample the pixels that we're going to copy.
And when I paint, you can see that I'm duplicating those pixels.
But this is really not looking much like a building.
And that's because of the spacing of the brush. So, we need to change the settings.
To change the brush settings, you can click on this icon.
This panel opens up. Then, drag the spacing slider to the left
to about 10 percent, and then paint and see how that works.
Looks like the spacing is still a bit much, so I'll reduce it down to five percent.
And I'll create a new layer, just so that we can have a clean layer to work with.
And I'll continue to paint. And that's much better.
And I'll reduce it by one percent, and I'll click and drag the paint.
And that looks more like a building. So, what I'm going to do now is just create,
yeah, one more layer, enable my background layer, double click on the Hand tool, to fit
the image to screen, and just so that things are not too confusing, I'm going to delete
these extra layers, because we don't need them anymore.
So, now with this layer number four selected, I can select the Mixer Brush, hold the shift,
click and drag up to paint your building. Be careful when you paint.
Do not resize your brush. If you resize your brush, you will also change
the scale of the building, and you probably don't want to do that.
Next, select the Move tool, and click and drag the building and place it over the original
building. What I'm going to do now is select the Crop
tool, and I'm just going to click and drag up, to expand my canvas.
I'll click on the check mark to commit the changes.
And I don't really want a taller image, but we're just going to expand the canvas so that
we can do our work. And when we're done, we're going to crop it
again. I just want to be able to see the top of the
building, because that's what we're going to work on next.
So, what I'm going to do now is disable the building layer from the layers panel.
And I'm going to duplicate the pixels that make up the top of the building.
So, I'll select the rectangular marquee tool, click and drag to select the top of the building,
like so, select the background, press Ctrl J, Command J on the Mac to duplicate.
And you can see that I only have the tip of the building.
And I'm just going to place that on top here. And I'm just going to select the layer and
drag up. And I'll use the arrow keys on the keyboard
to nudge it and try to figure out where I'm going to place this, so that it looks like
it really belongs there on top of that building. So, I'm thinking that maybe somewhere right
around here will work. And now I just got to worry about masking
the top. So, I'll zoom in, and I can create my mask.
I'm going to select the Polygonal Lasso tool, and I'm going to make a very rough selection.
I'm going to go quickly here. But in your project, make sure that you take
your time and get a better selection. But even with this rough selection, you'll
see that the effect is going to look very convincing.
So, let me quickly just make a selection here, with my selection active I can click on the
Layer Mask icon to make a Layer Mask, which hides those pixels.
I'll double click on the Hand tool, and you can see what I have here.
Now with these two layers, which is the top of the building and then the building itself,
I can select both by holding shift, clicking on both, you can see they're both highlighted,
then right click and select convert into smart object, because I want to treat them as a
single layer. I'm going to make transformations, and I want
these transformations to be non-destructive. If I need to make an edit to maybe the mask,
for example, I can double click on the smart object, it opens up in a new tab, and you
can make your adjustments here. When you're done, you can just close the tab,
and Photoshop will ask you if you want to save.
Just click on yes, and the changes will be automatically updated on your working document.
What I'm going to do now is place my building into position.
So, here's the building, it's called top. I took the name of one of the layers in the
smart object. I'll just rename it to building.
Then, with the Move tool, I'm going to just place it into position.
And I'm just going to place it right here, so that it covers the trees, and I'm going
to worry about this in a moment. I want my extension to not really be an extension.
I actually want it to be the whole building, so that I control it any way that I want.
What I'm going to do now is create the bend. We're working with a smart object.
That's what this icon indicates. So that means that I can apply transformations
non-destructively, which means that I can edit them at any time.
One of the transformations that I could apply is the Puppet Warp, found under edit, Puppet
Warp. By default, you'll see a mesh.
I don't like using the mesh, I feel it, that it's a bit distracting, so I just always disable
it from my options bar. And what I'm going to do is I'm just going
to create these pins. So, I'll create two, just to show you.
So, I have a pin at the bottom, and a pin on top, and I can click and drag these pins
to distort those pixels. So, what I'm going to do is right click and
delete this pin, because I don't really want that one there.
What I'll do here at the bottom is just create several pins to pin the building down, so
that these pixels here at the bottom really don't distort.
Only the ones on top. So, I'm going to create another pin here.
And I'm going to click and drag the building over to the right.
Notice how the building is bending to the right, but as soon as we get to the top, there's
a slight curve going up. So, this is creating sort of like an S, and
I really don't want that. To fix that, with this top pin selected, I'm
going to hold Alt on Windows, Option on the Mac, and you'll see this circle.
And I'll zoom in, so that you can see it. See that circle there? If I hold Alt, it appears.
And if I let go of Alt, it disappears. So, what you want to do is, with this pin
selected, just click and drag that to the right, just to create a much nicer curve.
See that? See how we have a much nicer curve now? And you can continue adjusting the building
accordingly. When you find a distortion that you like,
you can click on the check mark to commit the changes.
And this looks much, much better. And what I'm going to do now is work on the
background. And the reason that we want to work on the
background is because we can see part of the original building.
So, let me just collapse this, to have a little more room to work with.
I'll disable the layer so that we can see the background layer.
I'll click on the background and create a new layer.
And we're going to use the Clone Stamp tool for that.
Make sure that under sample you select current and below, because I'm going to enable the
top layer, and I don't want this layer to affect my cloning.
I just want to see what I need to clone out so that I don't spend too much time working
on things that I don't need to clone out. So, in this case, I basically need to clone
out the top left of the original building. So, with this blank layer selected, I'll call
it clone so that we know what that layer is doing.
So, clone, and then with the Clone Stamp tool, I'm going to increase the size of my brush
so that it's a little bit bigger, and maybe increase the hardness just a little bit.
And with the Alt key on Windows, Option on the Mac, I get this target icon, and I can
click to set a sample source, and you can see the preview overlay, and just click to
paint, like so. And I'm just holding Alt to sample, and just
painting in new areas, like so. And the reason that I'm sampling from so many
places is so that the pixels look a little more random and a little less like copy and
paste. So, now that I've hid those pixels, everything
looks really, really good. The next thing that I need to worry about
is the building here. Obviously, it's on top of all the other pixels,
and it doesn't look very realistic. So, I need to use a mask to hide and conceal
pixels. With the building layer selected, I'm going
to click on the Layer Mask icon, then I'm going to go into the Brush tool, and I'm going
to paint with black, using a soft brush. I'll decrease the hardness and maybe make
a smaller brush. That way, when I paint, I get a smooth transition.
Not only to be very precise, because the pixels below are essentially the same pixels as the
layer above. The only place where you really have to be
careful is with the windows. So, I'll zoom in, I'll make my brush smaller,
and then if I paint with black, I hide pixels. But I don't think that's what I want;
I actually want to reveal the pixels. So, I'll tap X on the keyboard to swap my
foreground and background colors. So, now that white is my foreground color,
I'll paint over the Layer Mask to reveal pixels from the building that we generated.
You can decide which pixels to show or hide, just make sure that the blend looks realistic.
Then, I'm going to double click on the Hand tool.
And you'll notice that the image is looking much, much better.
I'm going to zoom in, and I really don't like the way these pixels are bending here.
So, I'll edit the Puppet Warp. Click on this down-pointing arrow, and double
click on the Puppet Warp label. That brings up the pins, and you can adjust
them any way that you want. This is why you want to work with smart objects.
They make your adjustments, distortions, filters, and transformations non-destructive, which
means you can come back and edit them at any time.
But, anyway, I think that the problem here is that I created too many pins.
So, I'll delete a few. You can right click on a pin and select delete
pin. And I'll delete this one as well.
Then click to commit the changes. And that looks much better.
I think the problem now is the Layer Mask. So, let me just click on the Layer Mask, and
I'll paint with white to reveal these pixels, like so.
So just be very careful with the Layer Mask here.
And this looks much, much better. And that's such a small part, that when you
zoom out, you really can't see those imperfections, and everything looks really, really good.
At this point, all you need to do is select the Crop tool, then click and drag this center
handle down so that you can drop the image back to its original dimensions.
And now, we have a building that bends over the city.
And, if you want to learn more about the Puppet Warp tool, and what every option does, then
check out this video. I'll place a link in the description.
It covers everything that you possibly would want to know about the Puppet Warp tool.
Also, if you decide to expand and bend a building, share it on Instagram with the hashtag #ptcvids.
I would love to see what you come up with. And if this is the first time that you visit
the Photoshop Training Channel, then don't forget to click on that subscribe and notification
buttons. Thank you so much for watching.
I'll talk to you again in the next video.