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The Importance Perspective

Lesson 2 from: Essential Compositing Tips & Techniques In Photoshop 2021

Jesús Ramirez

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Lesson Info

2. The Importance Perspective

Learn what linear perspective is and why it is important for compositing.

Lesson Info

The Importance Perspective

in this video, we're going to talk about perspective. I think that perspective is the most important principle that you can learn to create amazing composites. You can get almost everything else right. But if you get perspective wrong, you're composites will not look realistic in this video. I'm going to show you what perspective is and how you can use it to your advantage when creating your composites to make things look more realistic. So we're gonna work with this background element. It's a graphic that's showing us a ground plane and a sky, and that is very important in every composite. You have to determine where you're subject to standing and where that ground plane meets the sky. And if you're someone who has studied painting or drawing, then you're probably familiar with linear perspective, which helps you create the illusion of depth in a two D plane. You probably have heard that you can find the perspective of an image by following the parallel converging lines. Those paralle...

l converging lines will meet out of Vanishing Point, which will sit on the horizon line, and it is very important to know where the horizon line is in your composites. Another way of finding the horizon line is by determining where the ground plane meets the sky. That meeting point will be where the Horizon line is. Another thing that you probably have heard is that the horizon line is at the eye level, and that is technically true. That is the eye level. But we're talking about the eye level of the camera when the photo shot or the eye level that you create in your composite and let me show you how this works. By using these examples, I'll open up this diagrams group, and first of all, you can see the Horizon line is right here now in blue. And if I enable this one point perspective group, you can see that I have these cubes and they are in perspective. It looks like they're actually sitting on this Grambling, and the reason that that's happening is because they match the perspective of the background. If you follow the parallel converging lines, you will notice that they will end up at a vanishing point on the horizon line. This is a one point perspective. All the lines in the scene end up on that one point if I bring in another cube, this one here, and let me the stable the other layers so that we can see it better. You can see that I can places anywhere on my image, right? But if I place it somewhere else that it's not in perspective, the Cube will not look like a sitting on that ground plane. If we follow the parallel converging lines on the cube weaken, see where this cubes horizon line is. If we match it to the composite, then the Cube will look like it's actually sitting on this ground plane, and we can move the cube anywhere horizontally, and the cube looks like a sitting on this ground plane. But again, if we move it too much further down or too much further up, then it will not look like the Cuba sitting on that ground plane. So that is very, very important when compositing Also, here's a trick for you. If you have your cube or whatever, your object is in perspective and you want to scale that object. You can press control T on Windows Command T on the Mac to enable the transformation mode, make sure that you click on this icon toe enable your reference point, also known as the pivot point, and you can click and drag that anywhere on the horizon line. And once it's in the horizon line, you can hold Altan Windows option on the Mac and click and drag on a corner handle to scale from the horizon line and in turn, that will scale your object in perspective. See that? See how it looks like it's receding away into the image and then coming up close to us. This is happening because the Cube is in perspective, and again I could move it horizontally and do the same thing. And it looks like it's still sitting on that ground plane because we have the right perspective. And even if you have a cube with a different rotation in size, as long as the parallel converging lines meet at the horizon line, your cube will be in perspective and it will look like a sitting on this grumbling. So that is just a quick run down of what perspective is when it comes to compositing. Before we move forward, I would like to point out that we have more than one point perspective We also have two point perspective, and this simply means that there are two vanishing points that end up on the horizon line. And an example of this is when you take a photo at the corner of a street. Maybe this is a building and you have the two streets here meeting in the center, so that would be an example of two point perspective. And we also have three point perspective where we have to vanishing points on the horizon line in one outside of the horizon line. Let me disable this horizon line because now the horizon line is down here at the bottom. You can see that better. An example of a three point perspective in a photo would be a photograph of a building that you're shooting from the street and you're looking up. You will have to vanishing points where the ground plane meets the sky and you will have a third vanishing point in the sky. Let me flip this group vertically and show you the opposite of this. This is the opposite. We are looking down on the building, and we have our vanishing points on top, still on the horizon line so you could imagine that you're doing a composite with an aerial photography photo and you just have the buildings below you. But the horizon line will still be where the ground plane meets the sky.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Perspective
Atmospheric Perspective
Matching Brightness
Matching Saturation
Matching Ambient Color
Select and Mask
Masking Difficult Hair
Blending Modes
Custom Brushes
Putting It All Together

Ratings and Reviews

David
 

This course teaches what you need to know about creating composites. As alway Jesus delivers in a clear, precise and fun way. You can just tell this guy has a great personality and he loves what he does. I greatly enjoyed the course and would strongly recommend it. A big thumbs up!!!

a Creativelive Student
 

One of the best courses I've done on CreativeLive and that's a high bar! An incredible mix of in depth guidance but also some simple photoshop tips along the way, I had so many 'wow' moments, learning things I had no idea you could do in Photoshop. Really a good pace too. Quite a short course but so many good lessons to revisit. Great work!

Jorge Perez-Martinez
 

I think this is a wonderful course. It goes into the key aspects that one needs to know to make a good composite. Jesus does not go into needles details and assumes a basic knowledge of photoshop; this make the course very manageable as far a its length. Highly recommended!

Student Work

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