Puppet Warp in Photoshop
An interesting tool debuting in Photoshop CS5 is a distortion technique known as the Puppet Warp. Clicking on Edit>Puppet Warp (note: you must have an unlocked layer to do this) will give you a mesh over your existing image. From here, you have the option to set a series of “points” on the image. Once the points are selected, you can click and drag portions the pins, resulting in a warp in the image. For me, while I find the tool to be useful, I still have a little bit of a hard time with it being called Puppet Warp. As a photographer, it just seems a little bit more useful as a tool to correct distortion and skew landscapes than to manipulate arms and such. That said, the tool has performed exactly as they said it would, and I’ve been able to make some interesting compositions with it.