Adobe Photoshop CS4 Studio Techniques

Vanishing Point

All the retouching tools we’ve talked about until now have had one major shortcoming—they treat the world as flat! But many images contain objects that appear to change proportion as they recede from the camera. The solution is to use Photoshop’s Vanishing Point filter (Filter > Vanishing Point), which creates different perspective planes in an image, thus allowing you to paint, retouch, scale, and distort in perspective.

The street in Figure 11.51 has a consistent width but looks smaller in the distance due to the effects of perspective. If you were to use a standard paintbrush tool in Photoshop and paint an outline of the street, you’d end up with the shape shown in Figure 11.52. But with the Vanishing Point filter, you can ...