How to Place Anything into Perspective in Photoshop

The Vanishing Point command in Photoshop enables you to place an object, or to edits images that have perspective planes. The perspective planes can be the side of a box, or a floor in the home interior, or a wall in a building, etc.  With Vanishing Point, you define and specify the planes in your images, those planes control the perspective of the edits you make, and then, by using a variety of techniques you can add or eliminate objects and apply edits by using painting, cloning, copying, pasting, and transforming tools.

In this tutorial, I will explain perspective and vanishing point principles, and then I will present to you the vanishing point tool in Photoshop and explore its options and how to use it.  Finally, I will make more examples to show you how to place a photo of paint on a wall of an interior home image using Photoshop. Another two examples are provided for placing a text and a logo into photos of a phone box and a road.

Image by PIRO4D from Pixabay

What is perspective and vanishing point?

Perspective is the art of representing three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface to give the right impression of their height, width, depth, and position in relation to each other.

There are typically three types of perspective drawing: one-point perspective, two-point perspective, and three-point perspective.

• One-point perspective:

One-point perspective is often used for compositions that look at objects from the front.

Lines extending from the foreground to the background gather (converge) at one point (to represent depth). The point of convergence is called the “vanishing point”. The vanishing point will always be on the horizontal line, or “eye level” of the scene, which represents the height of the eye or camera of the observer.

• Two-point perspective:

A two-point perspective is used for compositions that look at objects at an angle. As it is close to what the human eye normally sees.

In two-point perspective, in addition to depth, lines representing width also converge.

• Three-point perspective:

Three-point perspective is used for drawing compositions that are looking up at a large object or looking down from a high place.

To determine the horizon and the vanishing point in a photo, try to find two leading lines and the intersection of them is the vanishing point. To define the horizon line, draw a horizontal line passing through the vanishing point. The photos show you this method.

Photo by suzukii xingfu from Pexels

Photo by H. Emre from Pexels

Photoshop Vanishing point Tool

The Vanishing Point command contains tools for defining the perspective planes, tools for editing the image, a measuring tool, and an image preview. The Vanishing Point tools (Marquee, Stamp, Brush, and others) behave similarly to their counterparts in the main Photoshop toolbox. You can use the same keyboard shortcuts to set the tool options. Opening the Vanishing Point menu displays additional tool settings and commands.

You can access the vanishing point dialog box by choosing Filter > Vanishing Point

The vanishing point tools are summarized in the figure below

Remarks

• Placing the Vanishing Point results in a separate layer that preserves your original image.
• To paste an item from the Photoshop clipboard into Vanishing Point, copy the item before choosing the Vanishing Point command. The copied item can be from a different Photoshop document.

How to work with the vanishing tool

• Choose Filter > Vanishing Point.
• Select the Create Plane tool
• Define the four corner nodes of the plane surface. To reshape the perspective plane, drag a corner node. The bounding box and grid of a perspective plane is normally blue. If there is a problem with the placement of the corner nodes, the plane is invalid, and the bounding box and grid turn either red or yellow. When your plane is invalid, move the corner nodes until the bounding box and grid are blue.
• You can paste an item from the clipboard. The pasted item becomes a floating selection, which conforms to the perspective of any plane that it is moved into.
• You can scale, rotate, flip, flop, or move a floating selection by using the free transformation tool.

How to Place Anything into Perspective

Example 1 (pasting a selection from a photo into another photo with perspective)

This example shows the required steps to paste a painted photo with a frame into a living room photo.

Step 1

Open the paint photo, use the marquee tool to select the photo, and copy the selection into the clipboard (Ctrl + C)

Step 2

Open the living room photo

Step 3

Duplicate the layer (CTRL + J)

Step 4

Choose Filter > Vanishing Point

Step 5

Select the Create Plane tool

Step 6

Define the four corner nodes of the plane surface (make sure the color of the grid and the border are blue, if not readjust the nods positions until it turns blue)

Step 7

Past the image from the clipboard (Ctrl + V), and apply the transformation of the pasted image to resize it.

Step 8

Drag the image into the perspective plane

Step 9

Resize the image and position it as required

Step 10

If required fine-tune the image to adjust lighting and colors

The result is shown below

Photo by Vecislavas Popa from Pexels

The following are more example

Photo by Vecislavas Popa from Pexels

Example 2 (Adding text with perspective)

Instead of copying a photo and past it into another photo, you can do the same with text or a logo.

Photo by Brett Jordan from Pexels

Photo by Tirachard Kumtanom from Pexels

Example 3 (Resize a selection using the vanishing point and the horizon line)

You can resize a subject according to its position with respect to the horizon line.

• Determine the vanishing point (intersection of any two leading lines in the photo)
• Past the selection into the photo, and apply the transformation tool.
• Drag and move the anchor point until it reached the vanishing point

• At the corner of the transformation, tool click and hold the shift + Alt Key, and drag it towards the vanishing point
• The size of the girl will change according to the distance between the girl and the vanishing point

The below gif shows the idea.

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