Whenever I play around with paints, Gelli-Art prints, stamps etc I can usually make them do double duty- by scanning in the results and working with them in PhotoShop.
Since I am still learning there are plenty of times that I look at the image and think, hmmmmmm, that needs some work! One of my favorite “tweaks” is using Puppet Warp which can be found in PhotoShop CS5 and above. Using Puppet Warp, you can warp just a piece of your image. Adobe had a video where the tutorial showed you how to move a person’s arm!
The trick with Puppet Warp is getting the “thumbtacks” set correctly. If you don;t pin down the surrounding image enough, you can end up warping more than what you need. I usualy pin the 4 corners, down the middle, and then I pin an area surrounding the section I will be working on in a circular fashion. Once everything is locked down, I can put the pins on the section I want to tweak, and those are the pins I will drag to move and twist and gently guide my image in the direction I would like it to go. If it looks wonky, I can always undo with ctrl-z and try adding more pins and trying it again. When things look good, and I like the changes I have made, I accept the warp.
Once you accept the puppet warp, you can always use undo (ctrl-z) to undo the entire puppet warp change, but if you want to try again and go back into Puppet Warp you need to set up your pins all over again.
Oh- and I always do this on a copy of the layer, so I have the original and can compare.
Here is a piece I am working on from a class, Twinks on Yupo, I am taking with Jodi Ohl- (very fun BTW!):
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