Photoshop makes it very easy to change the perspective of a photo with the Perspective Warp feature. This tool is particularly useful when you are creating composites, working with architectural photography, or have any kind of flat or straight lines in a photo that needs adjusting. We’ll cover it all in this tutorial and you’ll be a master with Perspective Warp by the end of the video!
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1. Smart Object & Start Perspective Warp
Convert the layer you wish to apply the warp to, to a Smart Object by right clicking the layer and choosing to convert to Smart Object. Go Edit>Perspective Warp.
2. Create the First Grid
Once we activate the Perspective Warp, you have the option to draw one or more grids over different perspective planes in your image. I’m going to go ahead and drag out my first grid over the face of the building here in the foreground of this image.
3. Place 2nd, 3rd, 4th Grids
After placing the first grid, we can drag out additional grids. Notice that as you drag out a grid and get close to the edge of another grid, that line flashes blue. If we create our grid with that blue line active, the grids will connect together and we’ll be able to create our grids to build out a more complex perspective grid.
4. Tips for Drawing Grids
Use the lines that are in your image already to ensure that you follow the image perspective. With this image I am building my grids based on the vertical edges of the building and then placing the horizontal lines where I believe the base of the building would be and also following the horizontal lines of the windows.
5. Warp Mode Buttons
Click on the “Warp” button in the top bar and you can use the icons to quickly straighten vertical or horizontal lines or the third icon will straighten both horizontal and vertical lines in one click. We can also drag any anchor points at the corners of the grids to begin changing the perspective of our image.
6. Playing with Perspective
We can select any one of the anchor points and drag around the image a little and watch how it changes the perspective of the object or portion of the image that we drew the grid over.
7. Anchor a Line
Hold down your Shift key and click any horizontal or vertical line to “lock” that line (you will see the line turn the color yellow.) You can now move the anchor points around that locked line to be able to make adjustments, but keep that line locked into place.
8. Correct Image Perspective
I’m going to use this feature to jump in and correct the perspective of my image to a certain extent. We are able to tweak the vertical lines to straighten this building and make it appear more upright. I went over this image with the Crop tool to get rid of all the exposed, transparent edges and tidy things up a bit.
Check out the video at the top of this post to see even more detail about this tool and how you can use it more effectively! Sign up for my newsletter and stay up to date with all the tutvid.com happenings! Thanks for checking this tutorial out!
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