2000 AD Online Forum

On last weeks cover, the one with the family of aliens reading back issues of 2000ad, the design droids have cleverly distorted the covers of the comics being read so that they look curved. Does anyone know how this would be done? Is it a photoshop filter? I need to do the exact same thing today on a job I'm working on.

I wondered if Cliff R. had just taken a photo of the comic at the angle they wanted.  If not it would still be an wasier way to do it perhaps.

You might be right. Problem is I don't have the actual publication I need, just a digital version. Could just print it out and then photograph it I suppose.

Photoshop has all sorts of tools for mangling images -- but what you're looking for is probably 'Distort' - just paste down the image as a new selection then select Apple-T (on the mac, IIRC it's CTRL-T on the pc) then right hand click on the image and you'll get a context menu with the option 'Warp' this will create a grid which can be grabbed and and warped until you get what you're looking for. Hope that helps.

- pj

thanks pj, I don't have the warp option under distort, probably need a later version of photoshop I imagine (I'm on OSX Mac with photoshop 8). arse.

Filter | Distort | Shear

And, if you want to do it the other way:

Image | Rotate Canvas | Filter | Distort | Shear

(You may need to give yourself a bigger canvas to begin with, otherwise you'll lose bits on one side and get repeating pixels on the other.)

In CS2, it looks like the image below.

cheers for this, it's definately the warp factor that I need (can't believe I said that). Luckily a colleague of mine has CS2, so I'll be on my knees grovelling later. ta.

Skurve no need to get CS, you can do it like this:

working from top left to bottom right
1. rotate image so it's on it's side
2. go to filters/distort/shear
3. curve it how you like
4. rotate back to how it was
You can then mess around in transform to alter the perspective etc. to fit to how you want.

M

That's what I thought as well, Larf - but if you take a look at IndigoPrime's screenshot up there, note that it's concave on opposite sides - shear can't do that (to the best of my knowledge).

Cheers Larf, I didn't know you could do that in shear. I shall have a play around with it tomorrow.