Honestly, it really is! Hehe. The deformation tool is a recent discovery for me. I hadn't ever really used it before, and wasn't really sure what its function was or what it did. I'm one of those annoying people who never reads the directions or the manual. I like figuring out how to put something together or how to do something on my own. That has its advantages and its disadvantages. One advantage is that I sometimes develop unorthodox ways of doing things that allow me to do more with less or do something with a tool that someone who read the manual probably wouldn't ever think of. The disadvantage is that I can miss something that's very useful. Such is the case with the deformation tool. ;)
I actually figured out how useful the deformation tool is by messing with vector objects in PSP6. You can stretch, skew, lengthen, heighten, all kinds of stuff, with vector objects in PSP6. Well guess what, the deformation tool lets you do it with any object in PSP5, as long as it's selected or by itself in a layer. There are filters that come with PSP that will skew or scrunch an object, BUT THEY WON'T ANTIALIAS THE OBJECT WHEN THEY'RE DONE. Which sucks. The deformation tool will, however, and that makes it very useful.
Here's an example. This is an IFREEZN logo I threw together for the purposes of this little tutorial. As you can see, it's chrome with light blue and black outlines. No biggie. But… if I put it by itself in a new layer and then click the 'Deformation Tool', you get this box around it with 8 little boxes, one in each corner and one at each midpoint. Like this:
Now, if I click on the midpoint box along the top and hold down the SHIFT key, the little arrows change to 'left-to-right', and if I drag left, it will skew the object to the left. Dragging to the right will skew to the right… like so:
Now, when your done, you can click outside the box area and it will ask you if you want to apply the deformation. Once you click yes, it will re-anti-alias the object, and reshape your selection area (if you had the object selected) to match. TOO SLICK.
How does this help with car painting? It helps a lot, actually. You ever noticed how the door numbers on some cars leans toward the front on BOTH sides of the car? With most numbers You can't get that by flipping or mirroring or rotating, but you can do it by making the number normally, then making one copy that you skew one way, and another copy you skew the other way, and then put each copy on the correct side of the car... Yeah, it's extremely useful. ;)
There are other cool effects as well. Try playing around with the tool while holding down SHIFT, CTRL, and both SHIFT and CONTROL and see what you get. ;) Each lets you drag a point in a different way, and allows you to get a myriad of different looks (including curved text, if done right).
I use this primarily on numbers. I used to use a combination of filters to skew or stretch object before, and that took me a couple of minutes. Now I can do the same things in seconds using the deformation tool. (sounds like a line from an info-mercial, don't it? <G>)
Wow. Another lesson finished. You're doing pretty well so far, but don't stop now! Now I'm going to talk about the biggest hurdle you'll have to overcome in painting a car...
The color palette and it's limitations…
