Effectively Using Vanishing Point Filter in Photoshop

Using Adobe Photoshop’s Vanishing Point filter is a great way to effectively match perspective when editing photos. For example, let’s say you are designing a sign that will be hung up on light poles around town and you want to have a realistic mock-up to show your client. We put together a simple introductory tutorial to take you through the process of designing this realistic mock-up.

For starters, here is the photo we’ll start off with of a pole with a blank sign on it:

From here, we’ll need to open up our flyer (originally designed in Adobe InDesign CS5 on our end, but we’ll open a high resolution PDF in PS) that we want to place on this blank space. Once you open your file, select all and copy the image to the clipboard. Close your flyer document and return back to our image of the pole with a blank sign.

Next we’ll create a new layer in our document, that will end up being our flyer layer:

The very next step is to go to your Filter menu and choose Vanishing Point

This will bring us to the Vanishing Point filter window. Choose the Create Plane Tool (c) and draw your four corner points to create an image plane.

Choose Edit>Paste to paste the flyer design into the filter window:

Simply drag the selected flyer onto your image Plane that we created in t he previous step:

Once you are happy with the initial perspective on the plane, click OK. From here we’ll begin to tweak the new layer containing our flyer for a more realistic look. To do so, choose Edit>Transform>Warp.

Drag the corners and sides of the flyer to match the orientation and perspective of the piece of paper on the pole.

Apply the warp. To make this even more realistic I am going to take the extra step and draw a path with the Pen tool that matches the piece of paper and create a new layer to add a small gradient. To do so I just click on the Path palette and select the area defined by the new path.

The final step is to create a new layer, fill it with a gradient and change the layer style to multiply and drop the opacity to a low amount. Here is the final result:

We hope you’ve enjoyed and learned from this simple tutorial. Make sure to check back often for special offers and more great tutorials like this!