perspective is one of the many fundamental skills you need to master to make realistic edits, and Photoshop has a few perspective tools that can definitely be helpful and facilitate your workflow
In this tutorial, you are going to discover 3 ways to use perspective transform in Photoshop, to transform, manipulate and also place an object in Perspective.
1 – Using The Perspective Warp tool to straighten text in perspective
You might have been in a situation before where you want to straighten text at an angle on a street sign, and don’t want to go through the hassle of manually distorting the image using the free transform tool
Well, the good news is, you can do this automatically using the perspective warp tool in Photoshop,
Let me show you how to do it
you can access the tool by going to edit > perspective warp.
Once you do that, you’ll be able to click and drag from the corner of the sign to draw a plane
Once the grid plane is created, you can click on the points in the corners to align them with the edges of the sign and specify the perspective.
Now to warp the sign you need to switch to the warp mode by clicking on the warp mode icon.
Then you can either click and drag on the points to manipulate the image. Or you can do this automatically by clicking on the first icon to straighten the image vertically and the second icon to straighten the image horizontally.
And as you can see, the text on the sign is now straightened, and we can click on the check mark to accept the changes.
Now, all that is left to do is to click on C to get to the crop tool and we can crop the image to match the edges of the sign.
so that’s how you can use the perspective warp tool in Photoshop to straighten signs and text in perspective.
Now, let me show you the second use case of perspective warp in the next example.
2 – Using The Perspective Warp tool to manipulate buildings
in this example, we have a picture of a building and we can use the same tool to completely manipulate and transform the look of the building.
To do this, go to edit > perspective warp again, Now to draw the plane, start by clicking on the top corner of the building and click and drag all the way to the bottom edge.
again, you can click on the points on the edges to move them and match them with the perspective of the building.
you can also draw another plane to specify the left side of the building, And as you’re doing that, you will see the two lines get highlighted, And when you release it will automatically snap with the first grid
now let’s align the points on the left side again with the perspective of the wall, and you can also use shift and click and drag to the left to extend your mesh.
So now that you have the plane ready, you can now switch to “warp mode”, And again, click and drag to move the points and change the shape of the building.
You can also use shift and click on a line between two points, And once you do that, you will see that the line is highlighted in yellow, and that means you can move both of these points simultaneously
so we can move the edge of the building all the way to the left or all the way to the right.
And as you can see, we can completely change the perspective of how this building looks
we can also drag to the top and make it look like it is a wide-angle shot.
And of course, there’s a limit to how we can use this tool, As you can see, there are some parts of the street elements that got warped like the trashcan and some of the elements at the top. And we can fix that by selecting them individually.
All right, So that’s how you can use the perspective warp tool in Photoshop to manipulate buildings, now Let me show you now how you can place objects in perspective in our third example.
3 – Placing Objects in Perspective Using The “Vanishing Point” Filter
So in this example, I have a picture of a room and I also have a picture frame, and let’s say you are in a similar situation and you want to place this picture on the wall so that you can see how it looks on the room in perspective.
So let me show you how you can do that.
First, turn off the picture frame layer for the moment, then select the background layer (the room image layer),
then go to filter > vanishing point this time
The vanishing point filter works a little bit similar to the perspective warp grid but this time we are placing objects in perspective.
So with the “create plane tool” selected, click on the corner to add a point and then click again to add more points and follow the edges of the wall to create a plane.
once you add the fourth point, you will see that the grid plane is created and you can also click and drag on the points on the corners to further modify the grid (just like the perspective warp grid).
if you see the grid turns to yellow or red, that means the perspective is not correct, So it’s just a matter of clicking and dragging these points to fix the perspective.
You can also click on the zoom tool and you can zoom in or zoom out and further modify these points using alt or option.
now that you created the grid plane, you can switch to the edit plane tool, or you can click on V, and then click and drag from the edge to extend the grid plane to the edge of the wall.
And you will see that it will automatically scale in perspective and match the edge
Now that you have a grid plane of one side of the wall, let me show you a quick tip to work faster
switch back to the “create plane” tool and click and drag on the point in the middle to extend the grid plane of the other side of the wall easily without having to draw new ones from scratch.
As you can see, sometimes the perspective of the other side is not correct, So you can always click and drag on the points to fix the perspective and follow the edge of the wall
Now click and drag again from the edge to extend the grid using the “Edit Plane Tool” to the edge of the wall.
And the last thing to do is switch back to the “create plane” tool again and click and drag from the top to also extend the grid plane of the ceiling.
So now we have defined the three grid planes that make up the room, we can also extend the bottom part, but that’s going to be enough for the purposes of this tutorial.
and once you’re happy with the grid, click ok to accept the changes.
Alright, now that the grid plane is ready, we can now place the picture frame in perspective.
So the first thing you need to do is turn the picture frame layer back on, then ctrl/cmd click on the layer thumbnail to load it as a selection.
Then click on Ctrl/cmd + C to copy the image to the clipboard, and now you can turn off the layer and click on ctrl/Cmd + D to deselect.
Now add a new layer on top of the room layer to place the image into, and go to filter > vanishing point again.
You will notice that the grid plane is still active and now you can click on Ctrl/Cmd + V to paste the image.
If the image is big, you can switch to the “transform tool” and scale it down while holding shift to keep the proportion.
Now, as soon as you start moving the image, you will see that it will automatically start following the grid plane that you just created and it’s moving and scaling in the right perspective.
So, I’m going to move mine image to the right side of the wall and I’m going to scale it down a little bit.
once you are happy with your image placement, you can click ok to accept the changes.
And that’s it, as you can see, the image is now placed in perspective.
The last thing that I want to do is right-click on the layer and I’m going to add some layer style to make the image look a little bit more realistic.
and that’s how you can use the vanishing point filter to place objects in perspective.
So that’s three ways to use perspective transform in Photoshop, I hope you have found value in this tutorial and you found it helpful,
If you want to learn more about perspective, click here to watch my other in-depth tutorial where i explained the fundamental of perspective and how to use it to create realistic Photoshop compositing.
Other than that, thank you for reading the article, and I’ll see you in my next tutorial.
1 thought on “3 Must-Know Use cases of Perspective Transform in Photoshop”
I love how you use perspective transform in your photos! It really makes them look so realistic.