Perspective Controls with Photoshop

sanking · Jul 20, 2007

Does anyone know of a good tutorial on using perspective controls with Photoshop to simulate what we do with view camera movements? I have been using a lot of medium format film for architectural work over the past several years and have found some pretty useful ways to change perspective through the Edit>Transform>Distort controls. However, my skills with Photoshop are not cutting edge and I suspect there must be someone out there light years ahead of me with this kind of work.

Sandy King

jd callow · Jul 20, 2007

Sandy I use distort (and sometimes skew) as well, perspective in photoshop doesn't seem to correct convergence as well as it creates it.

I simply create a guide to align to and distort generally a selection or the entire image. I do not do this in steps. If the first try isn't perfect I 'undo' and try again. Each distortion degrades the image and 2 incremental steps is worse than one good one.

Hope that helps.

sanking · Jul 20, 2007

jd callow said:
Sandy I use distort (and sometimes skew) as well, perspective in photoshop doesn't seem to correct convergence as well as it creates it.

I simply create a guide to align to and distort generally a selection or the entire image. I do not do this in steps. If the first try isn't perfect I 'undo' and try again. Each distortion degrades the image and 2 incremental steps is worse than one good one.

Hope that helps.

JD,

In what way is the image degraded? Other than the visual changes one sees with the distortion.

Sandy

jd callow · Jul 20, 2007

play with it a bit and see for your self. Sharpness and detail gets muddied. It is similar to rotating an image 30 degrees once or 5 times in 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 degree increments.

tom_micklin · Jul 20, 2007

sanking said:
Does anyone know of a good tutorial on using perspective controls with Photoshop to simulate what we do with view camera movements? I have been using a lot of medium format film for architectural work over the past several years and have found some pretty useful ways to change perspective through the Edit>Transform>Distort controls. However, my skills with Photoshop are not cutting edge and I suspect there must be someone out there light years ahead of me with this kind of work.

Sandy King

Sandy,
I've been using this little widget and getting good results.
http://epaperpress.com/ptlens/
Regards,
Tom

donbga · Jul 20, 2007

tom_micklin said:
Sandy,
I've been using this little widget and getting good results.
http://epaperpress.com/ptlens/
Regards,
Tom

I agree with Tom about PTLens, it can correct some problems quite well and for the price of the registered copy it's quite worth the cost, however I'm not sure it will do all of what Sandy needs to do.

My 2 cents,

Don

sanking · Jul 21, 2007

Don Bryant said:
I agree with Tom about PTLens, it can correct some problems quite well and for the price of the registered copy it's quite worth the cost, however I'm not sure it will do all of what Sandy needs to do.

My 2 cents,

Don

Well, I am all MAC for image processing and from what I read PTLens is only for Windows?

Anyway, I was hoping there would be a tutorial somewhere by someone who really knew this subject well. I have been doing it myself for several years pretty much as JD described so I know what I am doing, but creative people always come up with new and interesting ways of doing the same thing so I am interested in how other people solve perspective problems.

Sandy King

Anonymous · Jul 21, 2007

Sandy,

I use distort/lens correction on CS2. It seems to work pretty well for correcting distortion (keystoning) but the trade off is that you lose part of the image. I have learned to shoot the image allowing for that in the final output.

I am not sure what CS3 has going for it in that area.

rorye · Jul 21, 2007

Sandy,

I have found Martin Evening's book "Adobe Photoshop for Photographer's" (ISBN 0 240 51984 1) and the accompanying DVD invaluable.

For perpective control I generally use the crop tool with Perspective checked.

Best,
Rory

toyotadesigner · Jul 22, 2007

Geez, you PhotoShoppers

To be honest: I don't have PS and never will. In my eyes it's a 'I-can-do-it-all-but-nothing-perfect' application.

To correct converging lines there is only one rock solid tool on the market:

http://www.marcus-hebel.de/foto/links.html

But be warned: if you have large scans (i.e. from 6x9 @ 2.400 ppi or higher) you really should be blessed with patience

I've been in contact with Marcus and he is planning to fix the speed in one of the next versions - which means sometimes next year or so.

But the results are stunning. Nothing else even comes close to ShiftN.

tom_micklin · Jul 24, 2007

jens g.r. benthien said:
Geez, you PhotoShoppers

To correct converging lines there is only one rock solid tool on the market:

http://www.marcus-hebel.de/foto/links.html

But be warned: if you have large scans (i.e. from 6x9 @ 2.400 ppi or higher) you really should be blessed with patience

I've been in contact with Marcus and he is planning to fix the speed in one of the next versions - which means sometimes next year or so.

But the results are stunning. Nothing else even comes close to ShiftN.

I downloaded this app and have been giving it a try the last few days.
It is indeed slow, but well worth the wait.
Beautiful results.
Thanks for mentioning it.
Regards,
Tom

Anonymous · Jul 24, 2007

I will second what Tom said. I checked it against PS after correcting and it was as good as it gets.

sanking · Aug 1, 2007

Donald Miller said:
I will second what Tom said. I checked it against PS after correcting and it was as good as it gets.

Hi Donald,

I tried to download the file (MAC G4 867 Quicksilver run by MAC OS 10.3.9) but was unable to do so.

Is this a PC program?

If not, I could try again with my Intel iMac.

Sandy King

MAGNAchrom · Aug 1, 2007

Another possibility -- capture your scan with perspective control in the first place. This is entirely possible if you happen to have a BetterLight scanback attached to a view camera together with a Schneider Makro 120 lens. I have built such a device which you can see here:

With the proper lens tilts you can achieve perfect scheimpflg -- obviating the need to stretch things digitally. Of course, nothing could be easier than clicking a button...

Anonymous · Aug 2, 2007

Sandy,

I downloaded it into my PC...I am running Vista. The difficulty that this program has is when you have an image with a lot of curves and then it gets confused.

Perspective Controls with Photoshop

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