How To Use Vanishing Point in Photoshop | A Step By Step Guide

Forget the transform options like skew, distort, and perspective! When it comes to getting your perspective right, Vanishing Point is the king! Be it DVD covers, gallery paintings, windows from a house, skyscrapers, or pretty much anything that is made or shot in perspective, you can easily adjust, modify, and transform it using this smart and healthy filter in Photoshop (CS2 or more).

Vanishing Point is a relatively new plug-in, that has been introduced in the Adobe PhotoshopCS2. It has the ability to clone, paint, and transform the perspective of your images. It’s absolutely fabulous and easy to use. You actually don’t need it, or better yet. You shouldn’t use the skew, distort, or perspective features from the transform menu for perspectives anymore.

When it comes to complex jobs, they’re not as precise as vanishing points, and they don’t have the ability to automatically adjust perspective. Oh, and most importantly, it does not take you forever to get the perfect result.

So, this plug-in has been in Photoshop since 2005. It’s not new, but it’s certainly overlooked by many Photoshop users and that’s why we want to talk about it today. It looks difficult at first but once you get the hang of it you’ll use it like a pro.

Long story short, here’s how to use vanishing point in Photoshop:

Vanishing Point Photoshop Tutorial

Step 1. Open an image with a strong visual perspective.

Step 2. Create a new layer (CTRL+SHIFT+N) by clicking the create new layer icon at the bottom of the layers palette. This layer will be the one we’ll be applying the filter to. Name it accordingly. I named mine “vanishing point.”

Step 3. Open the Vanishing Point window by going to Filters – Vanishing Point.

*If you haven’t used Vanishing Point before, you should probably read these few lines first.

The filter window has 2 tools that you have never seen before: Edit Plane tool (V) and Create Plane tool (C). These two tools do the whole smart and nifty job, and that is: they let you create and edit a plane in perspective.

Step 4. Create a plane in perspective. Grab the Create Plane tool and draw four lines over the object that is shot or made in perspective.

If your grid changes its color(yellow or red), it means it’s not in a right angle for a good perspective.

Good, now you have to create the other two planes in perspective (if that is the case).

Step 5. Create a new plane linked with the first one, you have to first select the original plane, move your cursor over one of the anchor points until the cursor changes,   hold down the CTRL key, and drag. Excellent!

Step 6. The newly created plane is very likely to be unfitted with the perspective you want, so if you want to change the angle of a plane, you have to select it first, move your cursor over an anchor point, hold down the ALT key until your cursor changes into a two-way arrow, then start moving it till you get the desired result. When you’re done, hit the OK button and we’ll be right on to the next step.

If you used my image, it should look like this by the time you have finished drawing your grids.

The trickiest part is over. Now, we have our perspective plane. All we have to do is copy and paste the image we want to place in perspective.

Step 7. Open the image you want to place in perspective.

Step 8. Select it and then copy it (CTRL+A, CTRL+C). Switch to the original document and open the vanishing point filter window again. You’ll see that the grids you made earlier are still there.

Step 9. We have our image copied to the clipboard. Now, let’s paste it: CTRL+V.

Step 10. Move your image over to the grids (by dragging it) and place it wherever you want. You can see how the image automatically adjusts its scale and p. If the image is distorted, don’t worry. You can transform it as you wish as soon as you drop it on the grids.

Step 11. To activate the transform tool, you have to press T. Now you can drag the anchor points to adjust your image as you like.

When you’re satisfied with the results, hit OK, and the settings will apply automatically. The job is done!

Conclusion – How To Add Vanishing Point in Photoshop

After you’ve defined your planes, you can use the Clone Stamp tool to clone everything you want directly into perspective! There’s a brush tool that you can use to paint.

Very important to know is that all the other tools will work in the perspective plane you’ve created. So, if you want to select an area from the perspective you’ve just defined, it will automatically adjust in perspective.

A cool feature in this filter is Heal. You can turn heal on, off or set it to luminance.  We’ll see how all those work in part 2 of Perspective Up!

Hope this tutorial on how to use vanishing point in Photoshop was helpful. Do you want to learn more about how to work with Photoshop? Check out more such Photoshop and Illustrator guides here.