Today new versions of Illustrator, InDesign, and Photoshop were released, and there are some amazing new features added for Creative Cloud members. I’d like to take this opportunity to show off a really cool new feature in Adobe Photoshop CC… Perspective Warp! Perpsective warp was sneaked at Adobe MAX last year – it’s a new way to manipulate your images by changing their three dimensional perspective. You can manipulate parts of the image to give the appearance that the camera perspective changes, all without having to create a complex 3D model! This filter can be used for changing entire images, and is especially useful when aligning perspectives while compositing content from multiple images.
Here’s a quick video I put together showing how you can use it within your own Photoshop creations.
All that you have to do is select the layer that you want to manipulate, then select the Edit -> Perspective Warp menu option. Using Perspective Warp is a two-step process.
- First you start in “Layout” mode. Create planes within your images to match areas or geometries of content within your image. This might be the sides of a building, or other areas that you don’t want deformed.
- Next, Switch “Warp” mode. In warp mode you can drag the pins/vertices to warp the content within the image. You can also hold shift and click on a line to lock that line to a horizontal or vertical position.
Drag the perspective warping where you want it, and then commit the changes by clicking on the “Commit” check button.
Now, let’s look at two scenarios where I’ve used perspective warp (see the video for step by step details).
The first example shows how you can change the perspective/focal area of the image. In this case I applied perspective warp to the entire image. I created planes to match the Adobe building in the center of the image, and then used Perspective Warp to shift the building focal area to the left.
Here’s my source image for this example. The original image was captured with a DJI Phantom quadcopter and GoPro camera, I reduced the GoPro image’s fisheye distortion using Adaptive Wide Angle and corrected colors using the Camera RAW filter before applying the Perspective Warp.
In the second example I composited a truck onto a street. In the original images, the truck’s perspective is close, but does not match the perspective of the street. Using Perspective Warp, you can easily re-shape content to match perspectives within your composition.
Original Images:
Composite Image:
I also used layers masks to remove the truck’s background and the Camera RAW filter to remove saturation from the overlaid truck image.
Links to original images used in this composition are below, thanks to Google’s image search. Did you know that there is a new setting to easily find images based on usage rights? This is really useful!
- Road (Creative Commons image by Patrick Feller via Flickr)
- Truck (Public Domain from Wikimedia Commons)
Be sure to check out the Creative Cloud learning resources to learn more about Perspective Warp and all other tools and features available within Creative Cloud.
This is a FREE update for Creative Cloud members. If you’re not already a Creative Cloud member, join today to get the most out of all of the tools that Adobe has to offer!