The Power of Goo

A few years ago, MetaTools released Kai’s Power Goo. It was a fun little stand-alone graphics program that was marketed largely as a toy. A little after that, it was updated in a Photoshop plug-in compatible format that was sold over the net as a single KPTX filter. Eventually, Goo found it’s way into the last release of the legendary Kai’s Power Tools series, under MetaCreations, as one of the 10 filters in KPT 6 and now available through Corel. It’s become one of my favorite Photoshop filters because it’s fun to play with. How many programs do we use that can have a person giggling to themselves as they distort somebody’s photo?
That’s the best part about Goo. It’s a joy to use , plain silly fun. There are a few other programs that venture into this area, such as Squizz or Corel Painter’s distorto brushes, but no other program has the variety of tools available to truly make a realistic distorted image. In every other program, the distortion is limited to changes that have been made to the image. Goo allows modifying the distortions with eraser, iron, and smooth brushes that can be used to clean up changes and make them more natural. Discontinuities can be smoothed out. The original image can be restored by degrees using the eraser and iron if a distortion has gone too far. Any successful caricature requires using a number of these tools. The bulk of the work is done with the smear brush, but the other brushes are needed to fully flesh out what can be done with an image.
Although Goo’s real forte is the creation of exaggerated caricatures, it can also be used more subtly. A hint of a smile can be added to granddad’s dour look in a family photo. I’ve used it to flesh out a texture brush for Corel Painter. Goo can be the foundation for creating some interesting textures for the web even though another program is needed to make them seamless.
Still, Goo is more about having fun and that’s what we’re going to do here. With the help of my nephews and nieces providing the starting photographs, I’ll guide you through the process of creating a successful caricature. They’re all great looking kids till I started gooing them. First, I’ll start with a photo of Alex. He’s got a nice winsome smile and I thought it would be a good starting point for an Alfred E. Neuman look.
Using the magnet, the head was widened and scrunched down. The magnet was used because it’s effect decreases with distance whereas the smear brush always maintains its power and often causes a more drastic change when used over a large area. With a large brush size, the magnet isn’t pulling as much from the farther portion of the circular brush. Smear is grabbing a full circle of picture information and stretching it and that’s often too much over a large area. The smear brush is more effective at a smaller size. Change the size of the magnet so that it stretches the whole head, focusing on the cheeks. Too small a size might only elongate a cheek. Too large a size will start stretching the background and areas outside of the head.
Goo follows the keyboard “Undo” convention of using CTRL-z. If the effect isn’t right, CTRL-z will return the image back to the state it was in prior to starting the brushstroke. Goo has only one undo, so letting go of the mouse button (or picking up the stylus if using a tablet) will stop the stroke. Clicking again starts a new stroke and only this new one can be undone. The only way to undo a mistake at this point is to use the eraser. That’s only an option if the underlying data hasn’t already been altered by Goo. If it has, the iron brush is the only other option and the iron is fairly tricky to use. It’s best to save frequently (click the checkmark) and then go back into Goo. Keep in mind that saving the image this way hardens all the Goo effects and they can no longer be undone by the eraser or iron brushes. Goo, however, can be used to make new changes.
The immediate problem with stretching the head and squishing it is that the features are also distorted by these changes. The nose has widened. The eyes have pulled away from the center of the head and have changed into a squinty look when the top of the head was pushed down. This wasn’t the look I wanted because it looks too obviously like a stretched image, something that can be done without Goo in just about any image editing program. I wanted to maintain more realistic proportions to the to the face. A face can be seriously modified, but some ground truth has to make the illusion effective. The smear tool, with a small brush size, was used to pull the inner corners of the eyes closer together and to push the outer corners towards the center of the head to more closely resemble what I started with. Magnify the image to better see the effects of what is being done.
Then the smear brush was then used to stretch the mouth in a near ear-to-ear grin.
The eyes were still too squinty and located too far down on the head. I used the magnet to pull them upwards. At a high magnification and a tiny smear brush, the eyes were opened wider by stretching from the eyelashes.
This led to a squiggly look to the eyes. It was time to bring in the smooth brush. This brush gets rid of goo’d discontinuities (without affecting areas that have not been goo’d). The smooth brush got rid of the squiggles and left (take a guess) a smooth line to the eyes. I did a little more work with smear to round out the pupils and smooth to clean up broken lines. The same technique was used to raise the eyebrows and make the nostrils more realistic instead of the squished look they’d taken on.
At this point, I was fairly happy with the effect that I was getting and decided to save the image as is. In any computer job, particularly one where a lot of experimentation is being done, saving an image in various states is a good idea so that there are always a few different incremental changes that you can go back to and rework if things get messed up. The saved image cannot be reverse goo'd--it becomes a bitmap image. At least the features as they've been set are saved. Unfortunately, the image cannot be saved within the plug-in so that it remains fully malleable.
Next, the chin was pulled down with the smear brush and the jaw pulled down from the center. The magnet might have been a better tool to use for this because it wouldn’t have pulled as much of the lip down while the chin was being stretched. I wanted to do that to show another trick. The iron was used to erase the lip from where it had been stretched. The eraser would not have been as good a choice because the eraser would have the underlying image even if that underlying image no longer resembles the current Goo’d look. The iron tries to restore the image at the point where it is being worked on. I’ve frankly found both tools a bit unpredictable to work with, but it worked just fine in this instance to move the lip back up to where it was.
A little more smooth brush work resulted in a better formed jaw. I tweaked a few more areas in image before finally saving it. There’s one more thing that should be done with an image that has been Goo’d.
All these distortions have left the image looking somewhat blurred by moving pixels around all over the place. A heavy dose of Unsharp Mask makes the image a lot more realistic looking.
In the end, the final effect wound up looking more like the Great Pumpkin than Mad Magazine’s mascot, but it’s still a nice bizarre looking twist from the original image. An earlier test case wound up looking more like good ol’ Alfred E. This is Shawn, before and after he got goo’d.
And, now it’s April’s turn. She’s so cute that I thought a cupie doll kind of look would be different. It provided a chance to use the bulge brush. The bulge brush shares space with the pinch brush. A click switches between them. There’s a trick to using these two brushes. Unlike the other brushes that work more globally and don’t leave any edges, pinch and bulge work from within a circle that becomes very evident when they are used at small to moderate sizes (1-100).
The following image is a result of using the bulge brush at too small a size. [photo aprilbulge] It’s a weird looking effect and isn’t causing a bulge in the image as much as a shift in the center of the image in the brush circle. These brushes have to be used at a fairly large size to be effective. Bulge needs a size of at least 150 and pinch is trapped within a circle until it’s at a size of at least 200.
The bulge brush made April’s eyes bigger. The smooth brush got rid of some of the bulge brush harsh circle lines. The magnet was used to pull the eyes apart and raise the eyebrows.
For a change of pace, the smear brush was used to contract April’s lips instead of stretching them. The magnet brush pulled the chin downwards and stretched the lips a bit. Some more playing around with the smear, magnet, and smooth brushes resulted in the final product.
Very bizarre results can be gotten with the smear and pinch brushes used on high settings. Here’s a few using Alex as the test case. Just changing the center point can result in very dramatic changes. Using pinch at a size of 200 in the center of the face pulls all the elements of the face towards the center. Bulge, at a size of 200, on the forehead made a super brain look. Two shots of bulge, one in the center of the face and one on the nose created a look not quite so brilliant. It doesn’t take much to make the super brain look go away. A lot of pinch between the eyes and bulge at the mouth results in a pear shaped head. Combine these techniques with the others here and some very unique characters can be created.

Some brushes are more useful than others. I’ve yet to figure out a good use for noise. It makes an image appear that it’s behind a glass shower door. It has only one texture look and that makes it much less useful than the glass features in other image editing programs. The brush can be increased and decreased in size, but it has no effect on the size of the noise, only on the width of the brush. The twirl brushes also have limited utility. Since Goo is primarily going to be used on faces, the twirl brush pinwheel effect is simply too drastic to be useful. Until I realized that the pinch and bulge brushes need to be used at a large brush size setting, I was ready to give up on them, so I may yet find a use for these other brushes.
These are a few examples of what can be done with the Goo filter. I’ve tried to fill in a lot of gaps that the manual doesn’t cover. The manual describes the brushes, but doesn’t get into the interactions between the brushes or how to best use them together to create a successful caricature. It took a lot of trial and error to figure out how to make everything work in consonance. It’s worth it because Goo allows things to be done that no other program even approaches. In the end, it’s one of the most enjoyable programs to work with and results are more often than not hilariously unexpected.