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Lesson Info

Compositing in Perspective Template

We have photo of a phone. For most of my professional career, I was a graphic designer. I've done design for some of the biggest corporations, a lot of them you would know. And I was really excited when i came up with this technique 'cause I, it was one of the things that I came up with myself that I didn't learn from anybody else. That was like the first time that I was like oh my God I just came up with something. I'm not saying I'm the first person in the world to come up with this idea. I'm just saying that nobody taught it to me so I'm very, I usually get very excited when I teach this. So and a lot of the work I had to do, we had to composite things into perspective. So we have this person here holding a phone, it could also be a wall in perspective. It could be a billboard. It could be anything where you needed to composite something in perspective. The problem with that is that you usually really don't know what the perspective of something is and what I've seen most people do ...

is for example if we wanted to put her in the phone, would be to, you know select the layer, press control T, command T to transform. Then right click on the layer and select something like distort or perspective and then, you know, they will tell you match the corners and that sort of does work. But there's a couple problems. A problem is that you don't really know the aspect ratio of the phone and really just by doing that, you're not matching it because the portrait had a different aspect ratio. So even though it may look okay, you're really not matching it truly in perspective. The second problem is that if you're working with text, a lot of times I had to work with text. It needed to be editable text because you maybe working on campaigns that have you know, different cities or different products or whatever so you needed to have a template that you could swap easily and the text could be editable. And the reason I'm emphasizing the editable part is that there's actually a feature in Photoshop called the... the vanishing point. And the vanishing point allows you to create a grid and you can actually paste in true perspective anything that you want. So if I were to copy text or copy a photo, I can paste it onto this grid and it'll be in perspective and it'll work great. The problem is that you have to use rasterize layers. Rasterize meaning flatten. So I can't use vectors. I can't use text so it's not editable. So, how do I create a template out of this box that's editable and it's also in perspective. And the way that I came up with doing that was by using the perspective crop tool believe it or not. So the perspective crop tool allows you to create a crop like this one here. And by the way, if this is another trick, you see how I'm trying to get to the corner but I really can't get there because it's snapping. My snapping is enabled. If you hold command or control on the PC, it disables snapping. See that, see how it no longer snaps. So I'm sure you've dealt with that problem before that you're trying to get somewhere and it's really not getting there. And it's like, I can't quite get to it 'cause it's snapping. Hold control, command on the Mac and you will disable snapping temporarily. So now I created a gid out of that screen. If I hit enter or return, it is so funny. It didn't work (laughs). And usually when it's something like let me do that again with the right corners here. I think I didn't match the corners. But don't worry, if doesn't work, I have another for you. But I know it works but I wanted use a phone. There you go it worked. Let me... the problem was that when I created the grid, I didn't match the right corner so I probably went to different corners, not matching the right corners. So I need to get that corner there. That corner here, that corner here, that corner here. So... That was the problem. So lemme just make sure I match my corners and I will also zoom in. I'm zooming in by holding alt. I have a mouse and I'm scrolling up on the mouse wheel. And let me just make sure I get those corners right. So it works. There we go. That should work. There we go. So now, more or less, I got the accurate aspect ratio of that phone. So that's really what the phone would look like if it were facing me. So now, what I can do is just simply press control A, command A on the Mac. It makes a selection out of the entire canvas. Or if you don't like keyboard shortcuts, Edit and Select All which is, or actually no, it's not under Edits. It's under Select and then All. I usually don't remember where the menus are 'cause for most parts, I sue keyboard shortcuts for the menus but anyway, Select, Select All or control A, command A in the Mac. It makes us a selection out of that entire box and I can just Copy, Merge. Just copy it. Then I'm just going to undo all of that. So now that I undid that, I come back to the original image because when we did the Perspective Crop, we actually crop the image. But I don't wanna crop the image. I just wanna get that aspect ratio right. Then I can press control V, command V on the Mac to paste. So now I have this box, it's actually the right aspect ratio of that phone. So what I can do now is right click on it, convert it into a smart object. Smart object is a container that holds one or more layers and you can distort it, apply filters, adjustments, do anything you want to it and it's non destructive. You can always come back and remove those changes. It could also be used as a template. So this is gonna be my template layer. So now what I need to do is press control T, command T on the Mac to transform and distort the corners. And I'm going a little fast here. Lemme zoom in so i can get a better result. Ops sorry about that. Clicking the wrong key. I'll zoom in just to make sure I get my corners right. So basically now, I'm trying to put this box that I cropped back to it's original position. There it is more or less. So there's that box back in it's original position. And now all I need to do is double click on this smart object. Look at the corner here, look at the corner of that layer. Do you see that icon? That icon there means that you're working with a smart object. So that's how you can tell when you're looking at the layers. So there's nothing inside of that layer thumbnail. It's a regular layer. If you have this little icon in the bottom right, it's a smart object. So now, I can double click on that smart object and anything that I put in there, will appear in the phone in perspective so, I can just type in here. And we'll just say CL Creative Live Photoshop Week 2018 or something like that. Whenever it is. So it's editable text. I'm gonna press control S, command S on the Mac to save. If I go back onto my composite view, that text right there is in perspective. If my boss, art director, client whoever says, you know what, I would like an image behind there. No problem, I can simply double click on that and drag any image I like into there. So lemme just drag one of these images. It really doesn't matter which one. Drag it in there. Put it here and I'll just blur it just so it looks nicer. Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur. Something like that. And I can close it, save it and that is in perspective. I didn't really quite get the corner there but I could click and drag it up just to match it. But the point is is that, if you get the aspect ratio by using the perspective crop tool, you can then make a copy of the result, undo all those steps, paste the result back into the original image. And then convert it into a smart object before you distorted. That way, once you distort it, it matches the original perspective once again and it becomes a template that you can use to paste anything in perspective. So I don't know how many of you are working with designs but that saved me a ton of time and I was doing work for multiple clients as you could see. I could change logos, texts, photos in an instant. Really really quickly. And you know what, I just thought about one tip that I wasn't gonna show only 'cause I thought the word template. Does anybody know how to make a Photoshop template, Photoshop template file. So now that I'm done with this file, I wanna make it into a template file. If I were to save this file, go to File, Save As and I'll just name it in my tips folder where I have the other files that I'm gonna work on. And I'll just call it, 00-template and save it. When I go into that folder, let me go open that up again. There it is. Obviously Photoshop files are PSDs. When I open up a Photoshop file, it opens in Photoshop. If you make a change to that file, of course you override that file if you save it. But this is a little tip that a lot of people don't know. If you right click on a file and change the file type from PSD to PSDT for template, you create a Photoshop template file. Your operating system will tell you hey do you really want to change the file name? Yes, yes I do. There it is. Notice that the icon changed. If I double click on it, it opens in Photoshop. But notice one difference and actually let me open up the first one. Let me close that file and I'll open up the first one. I'll open up a regular PSD file. It's not gonna be the same one but it doesn't matter. So if I open up a regular PSD file, you will notice that in the tab, you have the file name 01-Tips-Class.psd That's the name of that file. However, when I open up the template, look at the name of the file. It's an untitled file, meaning I cannot override the original file. So in this case, if I'm working on this file and for whatever reason I don't like it, and delete that layer, when I press control S to save, I will get this dialog box that says save the file as something else. I cannot override the original file. So if you're working with any type of work that requires making templates for example. Maybe for your social media, maybe for your business you have, you know a banner that you change every week, you can create a template, a PSDT and you don't have to keep remaking that template in case you accidentally deleted it, delete a layer or add a new layer or you change it somehow when you're working on it. 'Cause that's something that I used to do a lot. I used to make a lot of social media banners with logos and things like that. And for whatever reason, in one of those banners, we didn't need a logo, I would delete the layer and I would accidentally save that Photoshop file and then I'll have to recreate that template. So adding that T, that PSDT at the end of the file name converts it into a Photoshop template. And if you ever wanna go and edit your template, like you really wanna overwrite the template, you simply remove that T. You can right click, select Rename, and remove that T and it comes back into a regular Photoshop file. When I open it up this time, you'll see that it no longer says untitled. Now we have 00-Template.psd. So that's a really really great way of creating templates and I said the word template again and it reminded me of one other thing. If you press control N, command N on the Mac, it brings up the New Layer, the New Document window. And Adobe gives us six tabs, Photo, Print, Art Illustration, Web, Mobile and Film. Those tabs have templates created by amazing amazing designers like that guy right there. Really really good. I highly recommend them. (audience laughing) Yeah no but seriously. I was many designers who were hired by Adobe to create templates for their New Document window. I can't say what it is but in a future version maybe, you will see more templates from me and other people but that these are the different categories so you can have photo templates, like the one I created was a photo template. Print, you can get posters. You know like, music event posters. All kinds of different stuff so, you have templates available for you to download the templates inside the New Document window are free. If I'm not mistaken, you can download more templates from the Adobe stock websites. Some of them may not be free. But the ones inside the New Document window are.