The perspective tool

[Ned Sloane]

Hello, Affinity Teachers :

 

I have noticed that the warp tool in PhotoShop allows me to make many more

subtle adjustments to the shape of an object than the perspective tool in AFFinity Photo.

Is there a tool in AFF Photo other than the perspective tool that can be used to

distort objects ??

 

[v_kyr]

• Mesh warping
• Mesh Warp Tool
• Warping using Liquify Persona

Though not for preserving vector objects!

[smadell]

Also check out the Deform… filter (under the Filters>Distort menu). It's not intuitive at all, and I very rarely use it, but it's really powerful when you figure out how to utilize it. Check out this YouTube video by Olivio Sarikas, which gives some really good instruction on using this tool for subtle distortions.

z

[Ned Sloane]

Dear smadell - thank you so much -I would never have found this in the AffinityPhoto workbook or in the tutorials I watched so far !

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, smadell said:

... but it's really powerful when you figure out how to utilize it.

I just started experimenting with it & have a loooong way to go before I figure out the best way(s) to use it, but so far I have discovered a few things:

Selecting an anchor by clicking on it selects it. It can then be deleted with the delete keyboard key. Useful for deleting an anchor to remove the distortion it has added without disturbing the distortions other anchors have added.

Dragging a marquee selection around several anchors selects all of them at once, so they can be deleted in one step.

If a dragged anchor distorts too much of the surrounding area, new anchors can be added in those areas to remove the distortion there. Tricky to get it right but better than starting all over again.

[smadell]

Hey, @R C-R and @Ned Sloane – I'm not sure I've ever used the Deform filter "in real life." I think that if I have ever needed to do a minimal distortion like that, I've tended to use the Liquify tools (also no easy task, however). I happened on the filter, and the associated YouTube video, because I regularly watch Olivio's tutorials. It's a cool kind of filter, but I don't see myself using it much, if at all.

By the way, Ned Sloane, you should definitely try out the Liquify persona (and the Liquify live filter). In place of using multiple anchors in the Deform filter, try using the Freeze tool inside of Liquify to protect areas that should not be affected. And, as with the Deform filter, a very light touch is almost always beneficial.

As always, many ways to "skin a cat" (no disrespect to the developers' predilection for felines!)

[R C-R]

I have not even used the Liquify Persona for any serious 'real life' purpose, & when I have experimented with it that was mostly just to create exaggerated cartoon-like features in photos of friends to send them as jokes.

I guess I could use the Deform filter for the same thing but it seems to be much harder to control what is protected when using it compared to the Liquify Persona.

Possibly it might be more controllable when combined with 'marching ants' selections to limit the affected areas?

[smadell]

I agree with you about both the Liquify persona/filter and the Deform filter. Both are fairly specialized in their use cases, and neither one is "in my wheelhouse." I suppose if I were retouching photos for the SI Swimsuit edition (in what life would that happen?) I might become more proficient at things like this. But, hey, it's just me and these tools are not amongst the things I've needed in any but the rarest situations!

[rpaul]

I've been experimenting with the Deform filter a lot recently. Although its a bit buggy, it seems to have some versatility that I've never been able to achieve with Liquify or Mesh Warp. First, as with the Mesh warp, you can go back and re-edit a deformation arbitrarily, which you can't really do with Liquify. But it also seems to be a bit more targeted than the Mesh warp. So, I feel it works best when I am trying to re-map an image on to another with precision and with fewer steps in the long run.

[Dazmondo77]

I'd love to see improvements to Deform to make it more like Photoshops Puppet Warp, so you can convincingly add nodes to the joints of a cutout of a person or animal and bend, stretch or rotate without it effecting other limbs - I used to use puppet warp a lot in PS CS5 but find Deform really frustrating to use so usually end up moving over to my Mojave MacBook to do this kind of thing in PS CS5, I've used it twice today, but it would be super convenient if you could just use Deform in Affinity Which has been on my wish list for years