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July 13, 2005

Vanishing Point Perspective Guide

distantVP9.jpg
You know your lines need to converge to a common vanishing point. But what do you do when that vanishing point is so far along the horizon that it is not within your composition?

Here's a guide I put together on how to plan a perspective grid in Photoshop when the vanishing points are far off the page.

First a little background on layers and reference points in Photoshop.

distantVP1.jpg
Make a straight line on an otherwise new, transparent layer. In this case I have made a somewhat diagonal line, so that the line's tips are in the upper left and lower right corners of the line's imaginary bounding box.

distantVP2.jpg
Hit ctrl-t (in Windows) to transform the layer containing the line. You'll see a bounding box around the line, and a special point in the middle of the box called the reference point. Hover your cursor near the edge of the box until to see a curved arrow. The curved arrow indicates that the layer can be rotated. Drag the layer. Notice how by default it rotates around the reference point in the center of the layer.

distantVP3.jpg
While you are transforming the layer, look up in the options box along the top of the Photoshop CS2 workspace. See that little tic-tac-toe board? That is one way of controling the location of a layer's reference point.

Hit the white square in the upper left corner of the tic-tac-toe board before you rotate your layer. See now how the line itself rotates about one of its own end points?

distantVP4.jpg
The line will rotate about the end point that is located in the upper left hand corner of its bounding box.

Can you guess where I'm going with this?

Enough groundwork. Let's begin:

distantVP5.jpg
Go to full screen mode.

distantVP6.jpg
Zoom way out and establish a distant vanishing point. Use your talent and instinct to figure where your vanishing point needs to be -- that is outside the scope of this tutorial.

You may find guides useful here. Guides are the blue lines you get when you drag off of the rulers at the edge of the image.

distantVP7.jpg
Establish a line from your vanishing point through your image and out the other side.

distantVP8.jpg
Hit ctrl-t (on Windows) to transform your line layer at will.

but make sure you use the reference point locator first -- you want to rotate the line about the layer's corner, not the layer's center!

distantVP9.jpg

Posted by digital artform at July 13, 2005 12:29 PM

Comments

thanks for puttting the time to make this, a learned a few tricks

Posted by: magln at July 13, 2005 06:44 PM

Sweet! Practical perspective I can actually use, thanks in no small part to my restrictive desk!

Thank you for the tutorial! =D

Posted by: Aliginge at July 17, 2005 10:55 PM

Thank you! Finally, a fast and easy perspective reference in photoshop revealed!

Man, it could even be printed out to make a grid for non-digital work.

Good job!

Posted by: jp at December 22, 2005 08:56 PM

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