This is a fun and fast little tutorial for using a neat Photoshop tool called vanishing point. Photoshop is a great tool and has a ton of great effects that you may not even be familiar with. Vanishing point is a way you can place an 2D image into a 2D document and have it perfectly match the perspective of the existing document. How does it work? Well thats what this tutorial is all about. The vanishing point is a very easy tool to use and we'll go over it step by step. Lets take a look.
Get the source image
In my case I got a great Linux penguin! Really quickly I used the magic wand tool to remove the background. This is done by selecting the magic wand tool, click the white background then cut it out (CTRL+X). While that is still selected click on Select then Inverse, now we have just the penguin selected. Now lets hit CTRL+C to copy him, we'll need him in just a second. Open the building picture
Alrighty moving on, here in the video I opened the brick building picture. First things first, lets click on layers (if it isn't already open) and click on the little icon to create a new layer. This way we don't mess up our original image and we have a clean place to work with. Once that is up lets go into our vanishing point tool.
Vanishing Point
Lets now click on Filter, then Vanishing Point (Or just hit ALT+CTRL+V), this will bring up the vanishing point tool. Now what we do here is just click an upper left hand point, then we'll do another point further down the picture which is further down in the prespective in the lower right hand corner as show in the image below.
Drawing the first line
Here I highlighted the first line in red so you can see how we start to define the grid. Now make a 3rd mark below the 2nd mark, finally make the 4th mark back to the left under the 1st mark. The result should be something simliar as the below image.
Finishing the grid
Here we have our completed grid, you can see the perspective from the left to the right. Now lets adjust it so it has a higher height.
Adjusting the height of the grid
This is done by selecting the top middle white box, holding down the shift key and dragging the grid upwards as show in the above picture. Now we'll do the same thing do the lower white box but this time dragging it down.
Inserting the penguin
Now hit CTRL+V to paste our penguin, move him into the grid and immediately you will see him snap into the prepective of the grid. Try moving him around you will see how the prespective changes from close to far away - it automatically readjusts. Pretty damn cool! You can even hit CTRL+T to transform the penguin if you want to put him on an angle or resize him. Once you have him where you want him lets hit OK to close the vanishing point tool.
Making it look real
Ok so now the penguin is there lets go back to our layers and change the mode from normal to hard light. This changes the mode so the background image is partially visible. Wow look at the difference that makes. Go ahead and zoom in a little to see the detail. That's it!
Conclusion
Hopefully that was a nice tutorial for everyone to check out. Photoshop has a ton of great tools and this is just one of them. Vanishing point can be used for many more purposes and can be much more involved, perhaps in the future we'll come back to this tool to see the other uses.
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