Lessons

Lesson Info

Perspective Transformations

The next one we're gonna talk about is perspective warping when we have that barn that's falling over. So I'm gonna go ahead and open up Bridge, open up this image. Control and Spacebar, right-click, fit on screen. So as we discussed with this image before, this barn is falling inward toward the photograph. Now if you're kind of keeping score here and you're thinking about what you would do to fix this, we talked about your manual, we talked about in Adobe Camera Raw how that fixes lens correction, this wouldn't be fixed with that. It wouldn't work, because it's just distorting in from this side. The problem with this image, especially with something like this when you're working with wide angle images is that anything that's close to the center of a wide angle image is gonna be most closely representative to what it was when it was there. So if you shoot into a vertical angle and it's right in the center it's gonna be pretty close to that. But anything that's on the outside of that le...

ns is gonna warp in towards the lens and give you that bowing kind of effect. And because this building, one of the edges of it, is closest to the center it's not, I mean this side is just really forcing this way, but this is almost stable. If we were to press Command or Control + R to get our rulers open, like we have here, and I were to click and drag in that almost looks perfect. But then we look at this one over here and then we look at this one over here. My gosh. Then we come down here. Then we come down here. See that? It's just warped in a really odd way. Now this barn is not far from where I live, I see it all the time. And I know that that barn is not in that bad of shape. The lens itself is making it look like it's in that bad of shape. But instead of throwing something like this away we don't have to, we can fix it. We just have to think about all the things that we've done up to this point to be able to fix this. We have to think about layers, we have to think about masks, we have to think about warping our images, Command or Control + T to warp the image whether that's with perspective or with a warp, we have to think about maybe opacity if that comes into play here. Let's go ahead and press Command or Control + J, or Control + H to get rid of our guides real quick. So if I did wanna fix this this is something I would start before I did any of my workflow. So I would assess this and look at this and say yes, that needs to be fixed. Before I did anything with adjustment layers, before I did anything that would affect the pixels of this image, I wanna make sure I fix that before I move forward. So because I can right from, let's just assume I came right from Adobe Camera Raw, I'd press Command or Control + J on that layer. And this is good habits to get into it. If you have the data that's there and you want that to always be there, make a duplicate copy of your work. If you have work going on underneath there you would make a stamp above it. So let's say, I'm just gonna just show you this for gee whiz sake, if we go ahead and make a Curves adjustment layer and do that. If I press Control + Shift + Alt and E, or Command + Shift + Option and E on a Mac, that's gonna make a stamp of everything that's happening below this layer. So if this was to stay together you can't necessarily duplicate your background layer and put it on the top. If I press Command or Control + J and put that on the top look what happens. Where's my Curves adjustment layer I had on there? Well, it's not gonna show up there, because the Curve is underneath this layer and this is a duplicate copy of the background. That's the difference when you'd wanna use something like a stamp and when you'd wanna use a duplicate of a background layer. So I'm gonna go ahead and just delete that. That was more of a, for your awareness. If you have layers make a stamp at the top, if you don't have any layers and you just want to preserve the background just press Command or Control + J and that will duplicate your background layer. So with this what we need to do is we need to make basically a masked area around this, so that we have just our barn in here and nothing else. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go ahead and make a Marquee Selection Tool that goes around this layer. And I'm gonna give myself plenty of room on both sides, on all sides, I might even give myself a little bit more room than that. So let's do something like this. That marquee selection around the entire area there. What I can do from here is if I press Command or Control + J what that's gonna do is it'll make a duplicate with just that barn on the top and it'll give me a mask with it for the selection. But because I've already made a duplicate of this all I have to do is add a mask to it and now the layer that we have there is a duplicate masked copy of that barn. So I'll go ahead and turn this back on. Now what I need to do is I need to warp this barn in a way that's gonna make it fit into the rest of the image. So I'm gonna press Control + H to get my guides back. Your guides don't disappear forever when you press Command or Control + H, they're up here in your View, they are your Extras right here. Command or Control + H, you'll see your Extras. So I'm gonna zoom in here a little bit, about right there, and I'm gonna click on this layer. Not on the mask, but on the layer. And I'm gonna press Command or Control + T, and that's gonna allow me to transform this. And maybe zoom out a little bit here. Here is something that's interesting. I wanna be able to see just that box that's around this, so I'm gonna do something here, I'm just gonna press Enter and commit to this. This is one of those instances where if I press Command or Control + T look at the bounds that it's giving me, it's giving me the bounds of this entire layer including its mask. What I want, to make my life a little bit easier, is I want the bounds of just this area here. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to right-click on this layer and say apply the mask. So now that mask is applied, it applied itself to here, so now I no longer have a mask, I just have that barn. So I'll press Command or Control + H and I'll press Control + T again. Order of operations, it's like building a pizza, Blake. So that's still fine though, we are gonna put a mask on there, 'cause we are gonna need to mask some details out. So I'm gonna zoom in here just to where this barn is and I can still see my handles here. So when I'm in transform mode if I were to just grab this corner here and move this around it's gonna try and move everything all together, 'cause that's what Photoshop does. It says okay, you wanna pull this in, I've gotta do it and fix the aspect ratio while you do that. I just can't just grab that and allow you to work on this free-form. That is unless you press the Control key or Command key while you do that. If you press Control or Command now I get the ability to transform this on a free-form type of perspective. There are different types of transform though. Let me go ahead and press Control + T on that again. Actually I'll just, not press Control + T, if I go to Edit and I go to Transform you'll see that there's Scale Transform, there's Rotate Transform, there's Skew Transform, there's Distort Transform, there's Perspective Transform, and Warp Transform as we've already talked about. But what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna press Control + T and use the Command option. You can restrict it, so that you're just doing perspective cropping or when you press the Control key that allows you to move this freely. If I press Control and Alt on a regular transform it's now doing perspective transforming for me. So yeah, you can go into each one of those transforms individually or you can just manually do it yourself. So I'm press Control + Z and get out of that. What I wanna do is I wanna press Command or Control, click on this outer handle here, make my barn a little bit bigger and a little bit wider. And when I do that it's gonna change and alter the size of the barn. Notice how it made it smaller, 'cause I'm changing the perspective here. If I ever need to work outside of the bounds of what's happening here, notice how I've pulled this handle out to here. It's not lost and gone forever. If I press Command or Control + zero I can now see exactly where that handle is. That is an excellent hotkey if you're taking notes, Control + zero when you're working with Control + T or transforming will get you to where the bounds of the transform is outside of there. So even if this thing was huge and going way off the side if I press Control + zero it's gonna show me exactly where those handles are. So now I need to go down to the bottom of this, Command or Control, and just bring that in down there. And it looks like I even need to make my barn a little bit taller to match that line that we had before. And again, right here, this line now is not exactly perfect. Press Control and move that down there. And that's looking better, much better. If I wanna make it bigger just make it a little bit taller. I'll press Command or Control + H to get rid of those guides and now what do we have? Well, we have a very solid line around here and I don't like that. I don't like that at all. So there's a blend mode that's actually very interesting and this blend mode is called Difference blend mode. The Difference blend mode, as we've discussed before, does a lot of different math that's going on there. But when you turn the Difference blend mode on any pixels that are exactly alike are gonna cancel each other out and turn black and any pixels that are not alike you're gonna see that slight shift. So our barn, our original barn is this barn underneath right here. The one that we just created is this one that looks like a white ghost. That's a really awesome blend mode to use and when you press V to move this around, so I'm gonna press V for the Move Tool and move this layer around, see how things are starting to line up. If it's pure black that's areas where the pixels are the exact same information. So if I, let me just go ahead and turn this back to Normal. Let me turn this off. Let me take this background, Control + J, and change that to Difference. Everything's black. If I move this layer look what happens. So this can be a great way to align layers, using the Difference blend mode is great way to align layers. So after I do all that free-form transformation I'm really just turning that blend mode to Difference just to double-check what I've done and to make sure that I've got the barn still in its spot. Notice how I said at the beginning of this, we want to make sure that we fix this stuff, but we don't wanna do it the point that we alter the integrity of the image. All I'm doing here is I'm just fixing the perspective that was warped. So I'm gonna change that Difference to Normal. And the other reason why I would do this, just for more information on why I would do this and more justification, is because I like the rest of what's going on here. If I were to use some type of tool to automate this for me the whole image would shift and I might have to force that scale in, just like we saw before. This is a way that you do it manually, so you don't have to worry about that. So now I'm gonna add a mask, I'm gonna press B for my Brush Tool, and I'm going to make that brush a little bit larger by pressing the right bracket key, left bracket key to make it smaller. I'm gonna make sure my colors are set to the default colors, so D to default them, and then X to switch to black and white. And I'm just gonna start painting on here. See, I'm just making a very light painting mask on those areas where it's not quite matching up and measuring up. This is why we go so far outside of the bounds of our original barn, because if we didn't, just like we saw in the custom clean-up where we took one side of the image and brought it to the other side, we give ourselves a little bit more room to move around and manipulate. So just paint around here, get the clouds to match up. That looks good up there, looking good up top I think, but down here we have that line. So if I zoom in here one of the things that can really help me here is if I drop the Opacity of this layer I can see exactly where the barn is gonna be underneath, so I can select that, get a small brush, paint with black, and then turn that Opacity back up. Looks like I'm getting a little bit of the barn that we had in the beginning and that's okay. Press X to switch back and forth, paint in. If I need to make this one bigger, a little bit bigger, or move it up, press V for the Move Tool. If you wanna move something up and you don't wanna actually grab it and move it, just press the up key and that will nudge it up and down. So after I nudge this up to match the horizon looks like I still have a little bit of stuff messed up down there, right here on the side. B for the Brush Tool, brush this away. You might think, Blake, how often do you do this? I do it quite a bit. I take a lot of wide angle images. But again, that might mess up the top of this, so we might need to make our brush a little bit bigger, 'cause we moved it. Brush this away. And then we need to look at the rest of the image, 'cause as we moved that up we probably messed up this area right here. And a lot of times if you just use a really big brush and you start brushing it in it's very difficult to tell, very difficult to tell. You see that? We're using a very soft edged brush to make these match. Now if I get to the point, like this, I'm seeing repeated patterns of fuzziness. Make a smaller brush, I'm just gonna brush in a little bit there to fix that repeated fuzzy pattern. Now the only real difference here is gonna be what's happening on the right side of the canvas. I could probably leave that actually, because it looks like it might just be the horizon moving up on a hill and it would be okay, but if I didn't wanna leave it and I wanted to get really nit-picky on it I would just go in there and just start brushing that away. So here you can see, we're building up all the things we have learned so far to do something like this. We're taking layers, we're taking opacity, we're taking masking, we're taking blend modes to see if we aligned it correctly, we're using everything that we've talked about so far just to fix something very small like this to make sure that the perspective is perfect on that barn and it's not leaning in too far. There's the before, there's the after. There's the before, there's the after. My question is is it worth it? Absolutely. I have a series of images that I took of this exact same barn at the exact same time, at the exact same night and every one of them was like that because of the angles that I was stuck on. As a landscape photographer I will sit there all day long until I get the light that I want, that's right, take the shot. But you know what, I don't know what it is, and maybe all landscape photographers do it, but I still take a shot like every five minutes. Nothing really changes, so I get a hundred pictures of the same thing. But I did use that, this is one of my portfolio images, not this specific one, but one of the ones from that night was. So we talked about quite a bit and we talked about transformation here. Again, I just wanna reiterate that we weren't talking about any portrait tranformation in this one, 'cause we're gonna be talking about how we can naturally transform portraits in the natural retouching section. This was specifically for lens corrections, barrel distortion corrections, we started in Adobe Camera Raw and we worked in Adobe Camera Raw on the automatic lens corrections and then also went into our own trying to fix those lens corrections. Then we came into Photoshop, we talked about the lens correction in Photoshop and how it's very similar to Adobe Camera Raw. And then we went into adaptive wide angle, showed how we pushed and pulled that image, and I really want you to play with that. Take that image, download that image, 'cause it's not gonna be very intuitive, you saw me doing it, but what I used to do with that is I would just draw the lines on it and I would draw like 50 lines and I didn't know you had to move them. Photoshop didn't do anything. So if you draw the lines it's not gonna do anything, you have to press Shift and move them to that 90 degree or that zero degree angle. We then talked about the Warp Tool and using the Warp Tool to fix something like a vertical panorama. That was fun, we got to talk about vertical panoramas. Then we talked about perspective warping, very specific perspective warping that we saw in this image. So do we have any questions on warping? Can you tell us what your, how you start out to do that? So like you wouldn't warp after you do other things in the photo, like shading or lighting or those kind of things, you would fix that first? Absolutely, so that's a great question. So now I've got this like this, what do I do? Now what I would do is, because I am the way I am, I would probably press Control + Shift + Alt and E, or Command + Shift + Alt and E to make a stamp. And then what I would do with these two layers down here, I'd grab the bottom one and the middle one and press Command or Control + G and put them in a group, and I would call this group Original. That way I know that now when I do any of my work I do it on top of this layer. So much so that you could even, if you needed to, you could right-click on this, and you can make that color red, so that you know that anything happens above this red layer. This all right here is just because I wanted to keep it just in case I needed to have it for the future. So I had a question when we were talking about the, doing the, not the perspective, sorry, one second. It's fine, I need water anyway. Oh, in the lens corrections. Okay, so on the first image that was like in the gallery with the shadow and you did the lens corrections in both Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop, I thought they looked really good both ways. Like which one did you think worked better? Which one would you typically go for if you saw this image, you're like oh, I'm gonna go into this one. Absolutely, that's a great question. So if like this lens correction that's in Adobe Camera Raw looks very similar to the lens correction that was in Photoshop, which one would I use, when and why? Well, it's not really like, there's no straight and narrow way to say well, you'd do this and this and this and this. If I'm in Adobe Camera Raw and I remember it I'm gonna do this. And then I can always open it up as an object, so if I need to go back I can. I also like doing it in Photoshop. It's not gonna save it into the raw data. This will save this into the XMP sidecar file. So if you ever open this ever again this exact thing would be saved into your XMP sidecar file, so that that is always registered to it. So if I were to open this up into Photoshop, do all the work in Photoshop, and then flatten my document down in Photoshop, and then open this up again, and I didn't do it in Adobe Camera Raw it's still gonna be tilted. So if you wanted to maintain and make sure that it was always there with the sidecar file you could do it Adobe Camera Raw. There really is no right or wrong place to do it, it just so happens to be where do you do it. Does each one have their advantages and disadvantages? Yes, but in a way they're kind of similar, because you could open this up into Photoshop, and again, if it's not a Smart Object you could add the layers to the side just like you could if you were in Photoshop. So really it comes down to who you are and your workflow. If you're the type of person who does 99% of your stuff in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom and very little in Photoshop do it here. If you're the type of person who does 5% of your stuff in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom, like myself, then I would do it in Photoshop. Just 'cause I feel like I have more room to play in Photoshop, this seems so restrictive to me. So that was a long-winded way of answering it, but I just didn't wanna say it depends on what you want, but it depends on what you want. (laughs) Seems like a cop-out answer, but it's really the true answer.