Introduction
In this tutorial you will learn some basic photo manipulation techniques used in transforming a round tomato to a tomato with square corners.
Note: This tutorial was created exclusively for Tutorio.com by Pat Armstrong (goldenleg). Patrick is a New York based, multi-talented graphic designer and is currently accepting freelance projects. You can reach him at goldenleg[at]gmail.com
Choosing a tomato
The fruit used in this tutorial was a tomato but you may use a similar technique with any fruit, vegetable or round object so long as it has smooth skin.
Choose a photo that has an unobstructed view of the object and one where the background is easy to remove.
Getting a Rough Cube
- Remove the round edges using the marquee tool
- Flatten and stretch the middle parts of edges with free transform (delete the rest)
- Reattach the stretched out part to the side
Repeat this procedure for all the sides of the tomato. Then blur the seams (places where the sides were reattached) and use the healing brush tool to remove any imperfections.
Needs Improvement
After doing that my tomato looked like this. Its less round than before but not looking too much like a cube yet. Why ?
Its because of the highlights on the tomato, light bounces differently off curves and corners so the image needs to be changed to reflect that.
Visualizing the cube
Before you can start highlighting the cube you need to visualize what it will look like in cubed form.
Draw a basic cube on a new layer as a guide of what you want the cube of the finished product to look like. It will help you notice things that you need to fix and erase to get a perfect cube shape, example I notice how that is some excess tomato on the left side of the picture, which needs to be erased.
More importantly this will help you figure out where the edges and corners are going to be, so that the shading for lighting can be done correctly.
