Skataforeva
Can you tell me how you did this? Like what size brush and stuff?
I'm in CS5, so some of the stuff might be a little different if you're using the latest...but I don't think it will be that different.
I started with a high resolution picture so changes I made wouldn't be as obvious as if I started with a small picture (fewer pixels to stretch, so it starts being an obvious shoop). This pic was around 3500x2500.
I put moved the image to its own layer, and then I stripped out the background with the Magic Wand tool set to to 3% tolerance (the background was pretty much solid color), anti-aliasing on, and contiguous and sample all layers off.
I opened up Liquify and set my brush size to 1500...remember, I started with a very large image. In general, I'd think something roughly half the width of your image size would be good to start. Brush density was around 80 for my first pass, pressure at 50, and Show Backdrop was off.
I alternated between three tools...Forward warp, pucker, and bloat.
Rather than focusing on making the middle fat first, I made the ends smaller with pucker (starting from the tip and going in), touching up any directional shifts with warp. I just used taps for maximum control over the effect. If you try to drag the cursor around, you're going to make a mess in no time. Remember corn cobs tend to get tiny kernels at the ends...that's the effect I was sort of going for.
Once I had the ends looking fairly good, I dropped the size of my brush in half, dropped my density to 13, and then I used bloat on the innermost portion of the center of the cob, just a tap at a time, gradually working it larger and outwards. Without the density shift, I found it was too aggressive.
After that, I just worked over it a couple of times until it sort of resembled the shape in your initial pic, then I bumped up the constrast and saturation to emphasize the shadows.
I thought corn cob handles would set it off, so I added a layer and put those in using some catalog pic. I altered the color a bit and added some mild shading, and made them a little shorter and fatter so they fit the cob better.
Finally, I added the shadow on the cob, then resized it so I could upload it to my Tinypic, and saved it as a 24-bit PNG.
The whole thing was very quick, but it was just a demo. Does that help?
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