Extending and Cloning Distortions in Photoshop

Liquify allows you to extend distortions you’ve made in frozen areas into parts of the image that are unfrozen. If you have an image that has the requisite frozen and unfrozen portions, you should first choose a mode, which determines how Photoshop extends the image from the frozen areas into the unfrozen area.

Reconstruct modes
The modes include the following four:
- Rigid: This mode keeps rigid (natch) right angles in the mesh’s grid, which can generate some mismatches (Adobe calls them discontinuities) at the edges where the frozen and unfrozen portions meet. This mode restores unfrozen areas pretty closely to their original states.
- Stiff: Adobe describes this as a weak magnetic field, attracting the edges between the frozen and unfrozen areas strongly where they meet, and producing less distortion the farther away from the edges the unfrozen areas are.
- Smooth: This mode smoothly spreads the frozen areas’ distortions through the unfrozen areas. It produces a smooth blending effect.
- Loose: This mode generates an even smoother blending effect between the frozen and unfrozen areas.
Use the Reconstruct tool to expand the frozen-area distortions into the unfrozen area, using the mode you’ve selected to blend the pixels as you paint. You can drag to paint, or click and Shift+click to paint in straight lines (much as you do with Photoshop’s regular Brush tools).

More Reconstruction modes
There are three more reconstruction modes that work slightly differently from the previous four. These modes more or less clone distortions you’ve already applied elsewhere in the image. Like the Clone Stamp tool, these modes allow you to select part of the distortion and apply (or clone) copies of the selection to other parts of your image:
- Displace: Displace copies the amount of displacement at the starting point of the distortion to unfrozen parts of your image. You can use this mode to displace parts of your image to a different position in the image.
- Amplitwist: Amplitwist applies the displacement, scaling (sizing up or down), and rotation of the distortion to unfrozen areas to match those that exist at the starting point.
- Affine: Affine does much the same thing as Amplitwist, using displacement, scaling, rotation, and skew in the distortion to modify unfrozen areas to match those distortions that exist at the starting point.

Each time you click the mouse button, you create a new starting point, so if you are trying to extend a distortion effect from a single starting point, don’t release your mouse button until you are done using the Reconstruct tool.

Using Displace, Amplitwist, and Affine
All three of these Reconstruct modes use a different combination of distortion factors, such as displacement, scaling, rotation, or skew. Unlike the modes listed previously, the Reconstruct button isn’t available for these three. Note that you can use these modes only with the Reconstruct tool itself. To use Displace, Amplitwist, or Affine, follow these steps:
1. Open an image to work on, and choose Filter-->Liquify.
2. Choose one of the three modes — Displace, Amplitwist, or Affine — from the Reconstruct Mode pop-up menu in the Tool Options area.
3. Choose the Reconstruct tool.
4. Click somewhere in the image where you want to clone the applied distortion.
5. Drag with the mouse in the unfrozen areas to apply that distortion.
6. To change the origin of the distortions being copied, click again anywhere in a distorted area to choose a new sampling point. Then resume dragging in unfrozen areas.
7. When you’re finished, click OK to apply the distortion.