SFTW 158 — A Matter of Perspective

It's my turn to put up a starter for SFTW, and I am going with something a little bit different.  Basically a blank canvas. Regular posters know I am a fan of Lazy Nezumi Pro, and specifically its Vanishing Lines preset as a guide for matching a scene's perspective, but LNP does not work with OSX systems.  The Greatest Living Photoshop Artist, Bert Monroy, has always used Macs, so all he uses for his perspective guides is two or more three point work paths with the central point on the Vanishing Points.  In fact he uses Illustrator to lay out his perspective guide lines with his huge illustrations like Times Square.

Download the attached JPG and open in Photoshop.  Note: you have to obtain the starter image this way to have the work paths.  It will look something like this:

The way I do it is to place a layer at the top of the stack, move the work path end points into position and with a one pixel fully hard brush selected, click on the Stroke icon at the bottom of the Paths panel.  You might need to right click a path and chose Stroke the first time you do this to make sure the Brush is selected.

Tip: Did you know that with the  Move tool selected, you can hold down Ctrl (Cmd) and move work path points?  

Well keep things simple and assume that verticals are perfectly vertical so we can use Guides for those.

I don't want to put ideas into peoples heads, but a blank canvas might be a bit daunting, so this could be a simple way to fill a 2 point perspective.  Note that its rule of thumb that if we assume the terrain is flat, then people's eye lines will coincide with the horizon. 

My tip is to find each image element and paste into a new document so you can use Perspective Crop to square it up.  Make it a Smart Object — this makes the corner handles remain at the corners through multiple use of Free Transform.

You use either the Two Point Perspective as above, or use the central work path and make it a Single Point Perspective, so your image might look something like this (from Google):

The “rules”:

• Anything goes as long as it meets the forum rules on decency copyright etc.
• Anyone and everyone is welcome to have a go whether you are a complete beginner or a Photoshop expert. This is not just for our forum “regulars”, and other applications can be used.
• There are no prizes apart from the chance to practice show off or bring a bit of humour and fun. Don't be shy join in and have a go!

When posting back your image — please use the blue reply button in this first post. If posting a comment on someone else’s entry then please use the grey reply button next to their image post.

Have fun!

Trevor

Fingers crossed that the attachment loads OK, because I can't seee it!