Puppet Warp is blurring my photograph, any advice?

[danielg50178951]

I just learned how to use puppet warp to correct some minor perspective issues in my photo, but it's causing the photo to blur, which makes it look worse. Any tips on correcting these things without losing sharpness (It's pretty pronounced). Thank you.

[Chuck Uebele]

Just by it's nature, puppet warp is going to distort whatever pixels you alter. Of course that depends on how much you distort them. Can you post a screen shot showing the distortion?

[postrophe]

Hi

Not sure why using "puppet warp" to fix a "minor perspective issues".

Copy/paste your original image in a reply.

Pierre

[Trevor.Dennis]

After agreeing with everything written so far, I have to add with this is what Puppet Warp is for

When I was looking for something to test it on just now, I found some truly dreadful examples from people demonstrating the tool in tutorials.  Mine is not flash, but the sort of rubber limbed boneless people and animals you'll find on the web, are dire.

Show us the original, and you'll get a much better answer.

[c.pfaffenbichler]

Have you tried Liquify?

That will naturally also »degenerate« the edited sections to some degree but it might provide more subtle control in certain areas.

[Eternal Warrior]

Perspective Warp may be more useful here given the original statements.

[danielg50178951]

Sorry for the delay in responding. Here is the original. I read that low res images blur more, so when I up sampled, I saw less blurring. Still, while the effect was useful, I feel like there's a better way to correct the perspective.

Ideally the vertical lines of the cooks window are symmetrical and the counter is straight. You'll also notice that the coffee machine has a bizarre bend to it (at the right corner of the cooks window) and the cereal shelf next to the waiters head seems to droop.

What would the ideal workflow be to fix this?

[Eternal Warrior]

Hmm.. well these are just my own personal thoughts and this is probably a longer process than some others... but I would first make a duplicate of the image - then create a couple of layers, cutting out the chairs and some of their background on one layer, perhaps another layer to target the wonky counter and so on for all the issues.

Then I would probably use a mix of techniques such as perspective warping the layer with the wonky counter to first make it look straight and then clone/heal stamp and using a soft flow and opacity brush blend in any discrepancies or areas that looked strange... The dark colours of the image make it easier here not to worry that it will look too obvious...

If I had to use the puppet warp tool I would but I would generally try everything else to avoid it for the reasons stated above. Some careful use of the Liquify tool and gentle blurring would be a better resort - Although this too I would use as a final resort given that I prefer crisper and clean images wherever possible - assuming that that is the desired outcome that is.

[EDIT] Of course I forgot to add that at the end of all the editing of different layers to tackle each problem I would merge all this back into one layer but keep the layers where there were no issues (i.e. the chairs) on top of all my other layers and use the original image then as a base to clone/heal any original pixel depth/data that may have been lost.

[Eternal Warrior]

Alternatively you could use the perspective warp tool on just the original image and experiment to get a possibly adequate end result - This would depend on how badly warped the original was in your opinion obviously...

[Trevor.Dennis]

Daniel, is that the largest size you have of the image?  It's impossible to make a proper assessment on an image so low res, and not particularly sharp at that.  Paste it in at full res and we can be a lot more help to you.   I can tell you straight off the bat, that Puppet Warp is not going to be useful here.  Perspective Warp, maybe, but probably not.

Free Transform of individual objects on their own separate layers, is probably going to be best, with some use of the Clone tool to fill in gaps, so to speak.  Show us a much bigger image without those yellow arrows, and we'll take another look.