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!
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This might not have been such a good idea. This took me longer than I usually spend of SFTW, and it is still shite. 😞
If you want to move the vanishing points feel free. Strictly speaking they should be on the horizon, but we are not enforcing Scotties' Law (Ya canna' change the laws of physics captain.)
I think I need a bit of guidance! Should our drawing use the guides and paths? I don't see how yours fits?
I also tried bringing it into Illustrator where I made everything a guide. Now I'm stuck. 😕
Jane
Jane, it might because I have cropped out the work path vanishing points.
The guides are entirely arbitrary you have to use your judgement as to how much foreshortening the perspective is going to cause. I expect there is math that can be used, but I am not aware of it. You can keep changing each element to get it to look about right, which is another reason to make them Smart Objects. I think it would be close to impossible to do otherwise.
I hadn't realised that the guides also saved to JPG, and that is likely to have caused confusion because they would have been used for the example I gave with the starter post, and had no relevance to the Curry House upload. I have draged the unused vertical guides out of frame in the screen shot below.
You can use the same trick with elliptical image elements of course, as they will have recangular bounding boxes when you transform them. There is a wee gotcha with this though. If we look at the round window in the example I uploaded you can see the compression that Free Transform > Perspective creates (Note: this is true whether you use FT > Perspective or drag corner handles to Distort the bounding box). Unfortunately, this does not gell with reality. The window is recessed so we should see lees of the frame on its left side.
You can fix that by masking the area that would be out of view, or our best approximation of it. It's still wrong because we'd be about to see the frame on the left side.
Jacob, I'm getting a file not found error with your link.
This another way that is a little less accurate, depending on where your guide lines fall, but less messing about moving guides. It's basically using Free Transform Step & Repeat to copy and rotate vector line layers. You can make the line density as high as you like, but I have used 5° below.
I've actually made a bit a faux par here. I added canvas to the original 4000 X 3000 pixels because I was thinking the lines would not reach the corners when rotated, but they are vector so I could simply have scaled them up. I'll recover by claiming it would have increased the line thickness if upscaled. Hmmm...
I merged the vector line layers into one Shape layer for each side, so what I vae done here is select the Shape layers so they appear in the Paths panel, and then drag them to the new Paths icon. You can see that I have turned off the Shape layers but the work paths are still present. I'll upload this file so you'll have the work paths, but for good measure, I have stroked the paths with a one pixel brush. Just move the background layer top the top of the stack and set it to Multiply and you are good to go. BTW you can move the vanishing points anywhere horizontally.
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