Stretch the Color [ Photoshop Face Stretching Tutorial]

If you have been following my art account, Seeing__Colors, you will have noticed some signature effects that I use quite often in my artwork. They have become staples on my page and they do a great job forwarding the aesthetic look I am going for. Over the past few weeks, I have be getting a lot of questions from friends and followers about how I do each of these effects. So for the next three days, I am going to post a tutorial for each of my most popular ones. For today's post, I wanted to walk you all through what I call the "face stretching" effect. This effect involves the stretching of the face in order to create a curvy or linear stretching look from the face. This can be seen in my artwork below:

"Such a nervous flow..."

The Tutorial

The effect is actual quite simple in its creation, so this will be short and sweet!

Step 1:

First, you will need to find a free-to-use image where the face of the model, or the point you wish to stretch from, is clearly visible. In this example, I will be using a photo taken by Joshua Rawson-Harris from Unsplash, a royalty-free image repository that I have mentioned in past blog posts!

Step 2:

Next, with your image layer selected, you will want to use the lasso tool, found on the toolbar on the left side of the screen (or click L on your keyboard), to click and drag an outline around the face of the model. This in no way has to be perfect but should include mainly the face.

Once you have created the outline, click Ctl + J (or Cmd + J on a Mac) to duplicate on the select portion to another layer. This is done because we do not want to edit the original copy of the image.

Step 3:

After duplicating to another layer, select the smudge tool on the left side of the screen. To find this tool, look for a water drop icon. Right click this icon and select "smudge tool" from the options in the drop-down menu that appears.

With the smudge tool selected, adjust the brush size so that only parts of the face are within the circle preview of the brush (To adjust the brush size, use the left and right bracket keys on your keyboard i.e. '[ & ]').

After properly sizing the brush tool, adjust the "Strength" amount, found at the top of the screen, to between 80% and 90%.

In addition to changing the strength, look for the brush preview in the tool bar at the top of the screen. Once found, click the drop down arrow and adjust the "Hardness" to between 30% and 40%.

After changing these settings, place the brush preview on top of the face and then click and drag in any direction you see fit!

Step 4:

After smudging, feel free to add any other adjustment layers you want in order to bring the entire image together.

I hope this tutorial helped, but if there is any confusion, leave me a comment down below and I will answer it right away!

- Jared

#Tutorial