Atlanta portrait and wedding photographers Craig & Cathy Willis

770-439-6065

Perspective Control with Adobe Photosho CS or CS2


In Adobe Photoshop CS2 I knew about the general known perspective tool which you will find by going to: Filter > Distort > Lens Correction and the day I posted this page I was sent a Quick Time video from a fellow photographer Kirk on how to do what is known as a perspective control crop, which I like very much, and am very glad that he sent that to me.

With this page, what I am showing, is just another way to skin the cat, an alternative method. And in some cases it might even be more advantageous then the other two methods because with your having two layers you can take the corners that get clipped by the other methods, and have an easier job doing clone work and blend the top and bottom layer together, so you don't have to crop too tight into your initial subject, in those cases where you had cropped a little tight to begin with.

A couple months ago, I had an assignment to make portraits for a law firm for use on their website. After making the portraits they needed, they asked if I could grab a couple shots for their website of the building. I didn't know at the time I was there to photograph each of the Attorneys that I would be asked to photograph the building, because time of day is very important in photographing outdoors and buildings to get the best shot possible.

So I did what I could, given it was around noon, the worst time of day for such an assignment.

First open your image in Adobe Photoshop CS or CS2 and make a duplicate layer.

With the cursor tool active you will see grab points.

By holding the Ctrl key down with the cursor at one of the corners, you can drag that corner in any direction.

This will start to change the perspective of your image. In most cases, you need to work with more then one corner in order to get the look that you are after.

Because unlike the using the Filter > Distort > Lens Correction tools, you can move each corner on it's own as much or as little as needed.

Once you have it looking as you desire, then double click to apply the transformation, then pull and expand the image as you desire to cover the whole original area.

Then flatten the image and save, in the file type of your choice.

Of course you can save as a PSD file first before you flatten the layers together, if you wish to revisit the project and make any further corrections.

Below is an example of doing this tip.

The reason this image perspective distortion is very pronounced is because it was taken holding the camera in a horizontal orientation, and taking two images, the bottom half of the building, then the upper half, and then stitching the two together.

The reason this image perspective distortion is very pronounced is because it was taken holding the camera in a horizontal orientation, and taking two images, the bottom half of the building, then the upper half, and then stitching the two together.

When photographing with a wide angle lens, holding the camera level is important to get the right perspective, however not always can you get that view you want by doing so, either because of not having a wide enough lens to cover the entire scene you wish to capture, or not having the room to move holding the camera level is important to get the right perspective, however not always can you get that view you want by doing so, either because of not having a wide enough lens to cover the entire scene you wish to capture, or not having the room to move back away in order to get the entire scene that way.

Had I moved back, more trees would have been in the way, blocking too much of the building.

The image above is without the image perspective changes that I just described, below is with the changes.

Give it a try, have some fun.



Here is another example of using the Perspective control crop.

In this example I also did a sepia color mix because of what was ordered by the customer.

As you look at the image below, the lines on the porch supports they are lined up just fine on the left side, but on the right side you see them starting to lean. This is because of the perspective, and the lens used, however by using the perspective control crop, I was able to make both sides look level, or I should say straight up and down. Below is from the orig. scan, this was taken by my wife Cathy at one of her weddings.

Below is the final portrait for the customer after the crop for an 11x14, see how the lines on both sides now are good.


I hope this helps.

Craig




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