Mastering Freezing and Thawing in Photoshop

Liquify’s ability to protect areas by freezing, and unprotect areas by thawing, deserves a closer look. Consider freezing the equivalent to masking. Here’s a summary of the things you need to know:
- The easiest way to freeze/unfreeze is to use the Freeze Mask and Thaw Mask tools to paint the areas you want to protect or unprotect. Use the brush controls to modify how either tool paints or erases. When you set brush pressure to less than 100%, the opacity of the mask you’re painting determines how frozen that area is. For example, if an area is only 25% frozen, using a tool on that area will produce only one-quarter the distortion you’ll get in an area that’s completely thawed.
- You can use active or saved selections to define a frozen or masked area. This is a great capability; you can use all the selection tools in Photoshop to define frozen/unfrozen areas before you invoke Liquify. You could, for example, select a portion of your image by using the Magic Wand tool, another portion using selection marquees or Quick Mask mode, and then save them all (choose Selection➪Save Selection) as alpha channels. Then, when you use Liquify, choose any of those selections to freeze an area.
- Choose the basis to use for your mask from the pop-up menu of the Replace Selection command.
You can also choose a layer mask to define your mask. This is a great way to apply your distortions at varying degrees of intensity. Where the mask reveals more, the distortion is more prominent. Where the mask hides more, the distortion is more subtle.
- To thaw all frozen areas, click the Thaw All button in the Mask Options area.
- To freeze all thawed areas, click the Mask All button in the Mask Options area.
- To reverse your frozen/unfrozen areas, click the Invert All button. That which was frozen will be thawed, and that which was unfrozen will be frozen. Amen!