: Does Photoshop allow us to deform linear objects to complex curves? Tying shoelaces in Photoshop would be an overkill, but I have been trying to get the electric cord of a vacuum cleaner to

@Sarah814

You can try to warp nearly right image, but the result is unsure. I recommend inserting a photo of a well bended other cord. A piece of unused cable should be easy to wind to the wanted form. If that's not available, add a fake cord.

In Photoshop there's no easy to use tools to bend a straight piece of cord to perfect cable winding. Illustrator has more flexibility and we use it for this. Affinity Designer would be also useful.

The cord cannot be concentric circles because it's a spiral. But a bunch of nearly concentric circles can be a plausible fake:



It's difficult to see directly that this is a fake, because the eyes get confused due too many curves to follow. Perfectly concentric circles are more easily seen as circles.

The real cord has been erased in Photoshop, only the original plug is remaining. The fake cord has been copied and pasted from Illustrator and the colors are adjusted to match. See the screenshot from Illustrator:



The fake cord is a few identical circles, one of them is cut with the scissors and the tails are drawn with the Pen tool.

Then a rectangle with gradient fill was drawn, expanded, the clipping mask was removed, a small copy of it was dragged to the brushes collection and defined to be a pattern brush.

That pattern brush was applied to the rings.

NOTE1: There's no easy way to transform this to a perspective image of a winding which is lying horizontally on the floor. It can be a bunch of ellipses (=the former circles squeezed vertically before applying the brush), but the result will be poor. It's complex to make and it will look out nearly flat. I would say Crap:



3D modelling can give the perfect result. The cord can there easily be a spiral. Proper perspective drawing in 2D and real spiral 3D versions are beyond the scope of this answer.

In Illustrator you can make a 3D fake with 3D effect "revolve". Revolve a bunch of circles (=the intersection of the winding). Inserting the tails and the plug is easiest in Photoshop.

NOTE2: 3D, even the Illustrator 3D fake +integrating it to the image is more work than photographing a real cord, removing the background and editing the result into the image.

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