Bend Perspective in Photoshop
YOU’LL NEED THIS PHOTOSHOP Subscribe to a package at www.adobe.com/photoshop. PERSPECTIVE WARP was one of the new features in Photoshop CC that passed many people by. It seems complicated, brings back memories of the terrifying 3D interface, and requires a bit of preparation work before you see results.
In reality, it’s a much easier process than using Photoshop’s 3D tools, and as long as you follow the setup procedure, it’s quite simple to get something that looks good.
Perspective is the relationship between objects in an image, and can usually only be changed by moving the camera and taking another picture. Even changing the lens you’re using doesn’t affect it, although focal length may alter the perceived distance between objects as they recede into the background, with a telephoto lens causing them to appear bunched up.
Perspective Warp enables you to alter the look of a 2D object, so it matches the background you’re compositing it on to, or mark out straight lines in an image, so that they don’t change when you warp the rest of the photo.
1 ENABLE GPU PROCESSING Perspective Warp needs to use your GPU. You don’t need a FireGL or Quadro—anything from Intel HD upward should do the trick—but it’s worth checking if you’ve got it enabled, otherwise the Oil Paint filter won’t work either. Head to “Edit > Preferences > Performance,” and check “Use graphics processor” in “Graphics processor settings,” and “Use graphics processor to accelerate computation” in “Advanced settings.”
2 DEFINE PLANES To warp something like the corner of a building, you first need to define the planes. These are flat areas of the shape, and you can intersect planes to create corners. With your image open and background layer selected, head to the “Edit” menu, and select “Perspective Warp.” Photoshop provides some handy hints to take some of the mystery out of what you’re doing, and they do a good job of explaining it. You need to draw rectangles over the flat planes of the object in your image—so with the corners of a building, that means each side gets its own rectangle [ Image A]. This is Layout mode, and there’s a mode selector in the top-left. Drag out a rectangle, then move its corners so they’re in the corners of the plane you want to mark. You can join them together to cover corners of the building just by dragging their corners so they touch.
3 WARP! Once you’re done defining, you can get on with the warping. There are a couple of automatic options, or you can use the mouse. Change to Warp mode, and the rectangles you placed in Layout mode lose their grid lines, but otherwise stay where you put them. What’s new is that moving their corners now affects the image, rather than just changing the rectangles. The automatic options— buttons to the right of the mode selector—are to straighten
near vertical lines, straighten near horizontal lines, and straighten both. If you’ve fallen prey to the phenomenon of converging verticals by taking a photo of a tall building with a camera that’s tilted back from vertical, this can help you out. It can even turn an image of a building’s corner into one in which both sides of the edifice appear as one continuous wall—although it can do strange things to any roads or trees also in the image if you do this. At any time, you can use the mouse to drag one of the corners—Photoshop now calls them “pins”—across the image for an even stronger effect [ Image B].
4 TRY OUT SOME TEXT If you’ve played Prey, you’ll have seen the text of the intro incorporated into the city when you take the helicopter ride right at the beginning. Being an entirely rendered experience, this wasn’t done in Photoshop, but you can achieve a similar effect. A text layer must be rasterized before you can warp it, but the app reminds you of this. Use the Text tool to add your text to an image, and make sure you’ve got the text layer selected before you select “Perspective Warp.” It’s also a good idea to move it roughly into the area you want it to end up, because trying to move it when in Warp mode sometimes fails. Rasterize as needed, then drag your rectangle in the Layout stage. When you begin to warp, concentrate on getting the perspective right, rather than anything else, as once you’re finished, the text can be moved or rotated again.
5 SHADOW PLAY If your text is in the right sort of place within the image, you can make it stand out by adding a shadow. Add another text layer that says the same thing as the first, color it gray, and use Perspective Warp to bend it into a shadow for the first layer, to make the text appear as though it’s standing up within the landscape of the image—for example, if you’ve placed it on a lawn or a beach. Take note of the direction of other shadows in the image, because it won’t look right if your new shadow is pointing in a different direction. Once you’re done shifting the perspective, use a blend mode, such as Multiply, to make the shadow melt into the underlying image.
6 SETTLE IN To really settle your text into the image, hide the layer it’s on, and decide whether any parts of the underlying image should be in front of the text. Select them, feather the selection by a few pixels (“Select > Modify > Feather”) to soften the join, and use “Layer > New > Layer via copy” to copy them to a new layer. Move this layer to the front of the stack in the Layers palette, re-show the text, and it should now be part of the image, as though it was always there [ Image C].