This is vanishing point and vanishing point is a lot of fun it's also a little bit confusing, but once you get the hang of it it's totally doable so what you can use vanishing point is to edit and object so that it appears in proper perspective with something else. So for example, if we look in my layers panel here, we can see that my superhero is on several layers appear and then I've got just the building in the background, but when I use the vanishing point tool or filter rather then I can place an object onto the plain perspective plane of something else all within the vanishing point filter so that's, what we're gonna do this one is a little bit involved, but it's a lot of fun and it's probably be very useful to both photographers and designers, so let's, take a look at how to use it first, we need tio prepare the the object that we're going to put into perspective, so that means our superhero hey so if the island that you want to put in perspective onto another object has a white...
background and you need to add a layer mass to then you have to do that and apply the mask before you start messing with the perspective of this object because the vanishing point filter does not recognize layer masks, so if you pay, say achingly hi the background of a layer like I've done here with a layer mask and I copied and pasted this object for use in the vanishing point filter it would put that light that ground back onto it so the only fix for that is to apply the mask before you pop into the vanishing point filters that's what we're going to do so first he would gather up all the images that you're going to use in this collage. So our point here again is tio add a superhero that looks like a reflection in proper perspective under this building so you want to open up the photo of the building and you want to open up the photo of the thing that you're going to apply to it now? It's just is easy to do this in a separate document as it is tio combine the images in a single document before you do all that masking okay, so I'm going to go ahead and delete all of this from our files were kind of back to square one, so I've opened at my building and I've opened at my superhero now what we want to do is mask our superhero so let's go ahead and use the tool that's going to get us the farthest the fastest and that is the quick selection tool because we've got such great contrast between what we want to select and it's a background so let's, go ahead and click in drag to paint a selection on tio our superhero here and again, because we have so much contrast, this quick selection tool, which selects by color, does a really great job, and you'll notice that when I went to select this small area of his hand and arm, I went way down and brush size because the swath of pixels that photo shop is going to grab when you're using this tool is in direct proportion to the size of your brush cursor. So if you have a honkin big brush photo shop is going to grab a huge swath of pixels, whereas if you're trying to six so like something that's really tiny, then you need a really little brush. So that's a pretty good selection, but I need tio also get rid of the selection in this area in this area, so I'm gonna put the tool in subtract mode by pressing and holding a modifier key that's option on a mac or altana pc, and you can see how in the center of that brush cursor, we went from a plus to a minus. So instead of adding to the selection, we're going to subtract from this election, so with that modifier key held down option or altana pc, if you got get contracts, you could just click within that area. To remove it from the selection so I was going to mouse around to the other areas. This area is fine, so that looks pretty good to me. I might pop into the refined edge dialogue at this point by clicking the refined edge, but in this in your options bar, and typically, when I use the quick selection to elect this, I'll turn on smart radius and all this enter a value of one that just makes photo shop look around the edges of this election. You can also change the view so that you can see it as an overlay gives you a better idea of how tight your selection is. You can see the image on black and so on and so forth, so depending upon what's in your image on layers as a mask, then you could use one of these tools toe see, your selection will bit better realistic with overlay, and then I usually also add a value of one to the smooth fields that dis news, my selection at a little bit. And if you need to contract or expand your selection, you can do that here, too, by using the shift edge slider. See here again, we get that little scrubby cursor that you can just drag left and right, so if I wanted tio shrinking my selection a little bit, then I could drag to the left if I want to expand it, I could drag to the right see how it's making it larger in the preview there so let's call that good output to let's choose layer mask and click ok, here we go. So now we have our superhero masked because I'm gonna have to apply the layer mask. I don't want to lose the ability to edit that layer mask in case it's not as perfect as I think it is, so what I do with this technique is I go ahead and duplicate that layer by pressing command j on a mac or control j on a pc that gives me a mask if I need to go back and edit it, but now when I'm going to do is click on the other layer, click on the mask control, click it or right, click it so that you bring up this handy menu and we're going to choose apply the layer mask soc duplicating it just makes that mask hang around if you in case you need to go back and fine tune it now, we're ready to copy this layer so we're going to copy the contents of this later so we can choose select because we gotta have a selection in order to copy anything to our computers clipboard so it's cheese select all our press commander control, eh l z mousing see the marching answer running all the way around screen and now we're just going to copy to our clipboard so we can either choose edit, copy or just press commander control see and that copies that tar computers clipboard now we're finished with this document for the moment, so if I were doing this for real, I've saved this document right now in its current state and probably close it now let's, come over here to our building now we're ready to prepare our building. The only thing is that vanishing point I think is one of those filters that doesn't actually work as a smart object but that's ok, because we're really not going to be changing the building layer right here. What we're going to do is once we open the vanishing point dialog box we're going to paste in our superhero is going to paste into the dialog box, but when we come out of the filter we don't want our superhero toe land on our original background layer in case we need to move him around. So we're going to create another new layer onto which that superhero is going to get pasted it's confusing because the pasting doesn't happen right here it happens in the dialog box so what's going create a new layer in let's name it superhero now let's go up to the filter menu and let's choose vanishing point and a very large dialog box is going tio end up on your screen and because the last time I use this filter I drew this grid that's why the grid is automatically appearing it won't happen that way for you so I'm going and press the delete can't get rid of that grid so this is what you'll see soon as you open the vanishing point filter your first job once you get to this point is to create the perspective plane in that super easy all you have to do is make sure that this little tool is active in the vanishing point dialogue and it should be all you're going to do is click all four corners of the thing that you want to match the perspective of info shop will draw the plane for you now for this particular image I can't get to those bottom corners because of my zoom level so let's zoom out a few times to make that small enough where I can actually click out here which is where the corner points of that building really would be hey maybe I'll see about that far okay, so it doesn't matter which corner you start on it easiest to starting the ones that you can actually see so it's click once to set a point and let's move over teo the other corner of the building and click to set a point and now it's mouse way down here and I'm just mousing around until my the line that photo shop is drawing matches the angle of the object so click again and now I'm going to come over here to this side and again I'm just manipulating this I'm not pushing down anything I'm just dragging around and I want that blue line to be on the edge of the building so depending upon the objects that you're working with, you might have tio zoom way out in order to see beyond the edges of the image. Now right now I have a red plane going on which tells me that's footage, shops way of telling me that you've drawn an impossible perspective plane so all you have to do to fix it is to grab one of the corner points and you just feinting it you just drag it a little bit out and so photoshopped gives you that grid so I'm not doing any magic to get that grid I'm just herself was telling me I cannot create a perspective plane for you with that angle please fix it for me so you just grab any corner point and you just tweak it a little bit until you get this nice grid so americans in back in because I'm really only interested in this part of the image now we're ready to paste so we can press command v or control v and incomes are super hero but he's not in perspective what's going on photoshopped well, this is full of shops we have given you an opportunity to resize and then should you choose to screwed it around a little bit if you want so we could reposition this guy but as soon as we click on him and drag him onto that mash, then he flip flops to the proper perspective. Okay, so it's just indeed at and like that again. So if you click somewhere outside of the plane, see how the plane is right here in here. If you click outside of the plane, you could move him around the reason he popped onto the plane a second ago because I collect down here it was inside the plane, so at this point you compress the tiki not command tea or control t just tea for transform and now I've got transform handles so I could shift dragged to resize or superhero I wanted to do that and again to make him pop to the plane. All you have to do is click and drag him on to the plane and you can do re sizing here too. I still have those re sizing handles I just can't see them, so I'll undo one more time it came a little bit smaller while we're out here and that will be good nellis click and drag him onto the plane so now he's in perfect perspective and that amazing and we are going to do all that again so now we can click ok and there he is and the only other thing that we need to do to make him look really see how he popped onto his own layer because we added the new layer before we activated the filter so now we can simply change the blend mode of this one too soft light is the one that's going to work the best? How do I know that? Because I tried it through all of them that's how you do that so there's our guy in perfect perspective so let's take a look at one more thing that you might need to do with that vanishing point fills her because the filter does not work on smart objects and I'm about to do something to the actual building I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this layer just to keep the original safe so let's press commander control j to duplicate now let's go into the filter menu vanishing point so we still have our our grid going on here but what I really wanted tio let's say you want to clone an object in perspective so we've got a clone stamp tool right over here in this dialogue, so go ahead and give it a click I'll see him back out and again you've got these handy little admittedly, very brief instructions, but just enough that might remind you exactly what to do with this with them. This particular tool. So since we have the client stamphill active, we need to tell photo shop what part of the image we want to clone? So come down to the image and let's say, I want to clone this area right here over here, I want to make this side of the building match that side of the building. So this is just an example to get your creative juices flowing, those so that you can understand when this particular filter would be helpful for you. So let's, go ahead and hold down the option key, and I was going to click roughly in the area that I want tio copy from now I'm gonna release the modifier key as I click and drag to go over to the other spot. If I zoom in, I've got a little preview inside my mouse cursor can you see that? As I as I drag around with it, I've got a little preview attached to my brush there, someone to go up and brush sites, see how the previews increasing and increasing my breast size so I can just click and drag to paint and see how I'm cloning in perspective here I'm cloning that right side of the building onto the left side of the building but in proper perspective so this is handy when you need tio erase something that's in perspective copy something else over onto that area if you need to duplicate something that's in perspective if we wanted to create ah wholenother building to the one side of this already existing building, et cetera, et cetera. So again, all we did was grabbed the clone stand tool come over here within the grid and option are all to click the area that you want to copy, then released the modifier key move over to the area that you want to apply the copy, too, and then just click and drag to paint and you'll be cloning that area but also in proper perspective and then we'll be click ok to go back to our document. We can see that that cloning took place on the duplicate layer so we didn't harm original image in case we mess up or what happy so those are just a couple of ways that you can utilize the vanishing point filter. Its's rarely use filter and photo shot, but if you need to do this kind of stuff it's really one of the easiest ways to do it now you could we could have tried to use photo shops three d tools to make our superhero appear in perspective, but that would be a lot more complicated. So in this situation, vanishing point filters really handy for that kind of stuff. So if you need tio pace, a new image on top of a billboard that shot in perspective, if you need to pace any image on top of a tv screen, that's at a per at an angle or let's, say, create a fake dvd cover. If you felt like a blank shot of a dvd, cover, this shot in perspective, and you could apply another cover to that. That looks really so are changing out, but covers there's all kinds of uses, mainly in production, to be quite honest. But for photographers, you, you could create some special effect that might also be sellable artwork in your business. So that is les vanishing point.