If you’ve spent any amount of time checking out sites like Worth1000.com, you’ve probably seen examples of people creating square fruit. It’s a really awesome looking effect, that is surprisingly easy to do.

 

Here’s what we’ll be making:

Step 1

I’ll be using this picture courtesy of sxc.hu:

Click to Get Original

I chose to use this picture because it has a simple background which will save us a bit of time. Open up the picture in photoshop (if you are using the original large image, go to Image > Image Size and scale it down to around 20%).

There are several ways we could cut this apple out, but the easiest and fastest way in this instance will probably be the magnetic lasso tool (L), which will probably be hiding behind the lasso tool for you.

Step 2

With the magnetic lasso tool selected, zoom in a little, and simply click close to the side of the apple and trace around the entire apple including the stem. The magnetic lasso will just cling to the side of the apple. If it doesn’t cling to the right spot, you can press delete to remove a point and click where you want it to go. Once you have gone all the way around, click on the point where you started to make the selection.

Step 3

Invert the selection (Shift + Ctrl + I) in order to select the background, and press delete. If there’s any sharp corners you can use the eraser tool now very sparingly to touch it up. Make a new layer above the apple and set your foreground color to something that stands out, like neon green. Name this layer ‘Cube.’ Grab the line tool (U), make sure it’s set to Fill Pixels and has a 3px weight.

Now draw the edges of a cube. Try to use the perspective of your fruit as a guide. In other words, the top of your cube should look like it’s flat with the top of your fruit.

Step 4

Here’s where the fun part begins. Duplicate the layer with the fruit on it (Ctrl + J), and hide the bottom one. Then select the top one and go to Filter > Liquify. Make sure that on the bottom of the window that pops up ‘Show Backdrop’ is checked and under that ‘Use’ is set to Cube. Then use the zoom tool to zoom in a little.

Make sure you have the top left button selected (Forward Warp Tool), and have your brush size set to 50, your brush density set to 50 and you brush pressure set to 100. Then put your brush cross hair just outside of the side of the fruit, and push the sides in until they line up with the cube that you made. If you make a mistake, press Ctrl + Alt + Z to go back a step.

That dark checkered pattern still just means that it’s transparent, my settings just are a little different than yours probably are. Continue doing this until every side lines up with the cube. You may have to pull some parts out in order to achieve this as well. Don’t accept the changes yet though.

Step 5

It’s looking good, but there’s still some work to be done. Notice that in the front it still looks like the apple is bulging out of the box. We’re going to make it look flatter. Grab the pucker tool (S), and start clicking wherever it looks like it’s bulging out too much. Then you can switch to the bloat tool (B), and click around some of the sides to further increase the effect. When you are happy, click OK.

Step 6

Like mine yours probably has little bulges on it. If you really want to fix them you can go back into Liquify, but I think it makes it look more realistic. My main concern right now is to get rid of the highlights and put them where I wanted. I would normally line up my edges along the highlights, but it wouldn’t have worked well on this particular image. I just used the clone stamp tool with a large soft brush to brush over the highlights on the front and right side.

Now create a layer above the apple and grab the brush tool with a white, 13px, 50% hardness brush. Just lightly brush along the three top sides that we can see. Lower that layers opacity to around 25%, and use the eraser tool with a soft brush to randomly erase parts of it. That will leave you with just a faint highlight that will really improve the image a lot.

Step 7

The rest now is just putting the apple in a scene. You can start by increasing your canvas size a bit by going to Imagee > Canvas Size. I then added a soft shadow to the apple by holding Ctrl while clicking on the apple layer’s thumbnail, in order to select that layers contents, creating a new layer underneath the apple layer, and filling it with black. Then I used the distort tool found at Edit > Transform > Distort in order to put the shadow in a reasonable spot. To pick an appropriate spot for the shadow, you basically just look for the spot with the brightest highlight on the apple and put it behind that.

Next I placed a gaussian blur on the shadow layer (Filter > Blur > Gaussian Blur) with a radius of 12 in order to soften the edges. Finally I lowered the layer’s opacity to 26%.

Step 8

I selected the apple layer’s opacity again by holding Ctrl and click on its thumbnail. Then I created another layer underneath the apple layer and filled it with black just like we did before. I then used a gaussian blug with a radius of 1.6, and I nudged the layers contents down around 3 pixels and to the right once. Then I lower that layer’s opacity to 69%, and used the eraser tool to erase everything that wasn’t directly below the apple.

Final

Here’s my final result again:

There’s several things I could touch up, but I mainly just wanted to show you how to use the liquify tool to create this really cool effect. I added a wood texture underneath messed with some of the settings, but this step really is up to you. You could try removing the shadows and putting the apple in someone’s hand or alongside other fruit in a fruit bowl to finish this piece off. Link to your final result in the comments if you want to show it off.

Download the PSD