The Perspective Warp Tool with Adobe Photoshop

1. Let's 'Perspective Warp': [MUSIC] Do you want to learn the famous Photoshop Perspective Warp tool? Then this short class is for you. My name is Keith and I'm an Adobe instructor working at the UK's leading Adobe Training Centre in London. I'm a graphics designer and the shoe designer who's worked with Jimmy Choo and Sophia Webster. The perspective warp is essentially changing the perspective of an image so it fits nicely into a screen, whether it be a mobile phone, an iPad, or a computer. It is often used to display one's websites on that screen, to encourage viewers to head to your website and create engagements. We will be practicing with a couple of images, one One be a computer screen and the other will be a mobile phone. We will also be using image adjustments, and change filters, and brightness, and contrasts, and change of color to ensure that our image looks seamless and the most realistic possible. Now feel free to take screen grabs of your images, of your websites, of whatever you would like to display, and use it in these exercises to make it your own. I can't wait to see what you come up with. So let's get started. 2. Getting The Files ready: [MUSIC] Okay guys, are you ready to start learning the perspective Warp tool? It's a super cool tool and it's not that hard to use. That's exciting. What we're going to learn in this class is how to use the perspective Warp tool on a computer screen as per here. That just means changing the perspective of that image so it fit's here. As you can see I've done it here with a screen grab of one of my Skillshare courses, and here another image. We're also going to learn this with a phone. On top of that we're going to learn how to mask or hide a little bit here using layer mask, and how to change the image adjustments and colors and add a filter to this image so it looks more realistic. That's super cool. Now, first things first let's talk about the files, getting our files ready. You should receive a zip file called Perspective Warp. If you double-click on that zip file it will expand into a folder and you can access all the files inside. I'm just going to delete this folder because it's a copy. If you open this folder that you have, you'll see the background images. This is an extra one that you'll be able to play with later. The examples of the images that I created, and the images that we'll be placing in our screens. Now I've just taken a few screen grabs from my Skillshare profile. But feel free to take screen grabs of your own websites, your own images, or whatever you would like to display. 3. Perspective Warp Explained: Let's get started and head to Adobe Photoshop. If you can go to Photoshop, we're going to open this image right now by going to File, Open as Smart Object. Now a smart object essentially allows you to keep the image and make some edits that aren't permanent so you can always edit it and make changes if you wanted to. Get in the habit of opening as a smart object and open that computer image. This will be the background. Open it up, and there we go. Now what we'll do now is we're going to place an image on top of this, we'll go straight in. To do this, we have to go to File, Place Embedded. This will place an image as well as a smart object, which, again, means that we can make edits and they're not permanent. Now I want you to select images and select any of those landscape images you want or your own images, make sure its landscape, because the computer screen over here is a landscape image. I'm going to choose this one. What a beautiful image. I really want to be there right now. Click on "Place". We're going to resize this image right now by left clicking and dragging from the corners like here, approximately. When you're happy with the way it's sized, you press "Enter". We'll head straight to the perspective warp, which is really easy. It's just a couple of steps. First we'll have to go to Edit Perspective Warp. To do this there are two steps involved. The first step would be to define the plane by click and drag inside the borders of the image. Then when you're done, you press "Enter" or "Return". Now we're at the second step. You'll see the pins turn black, which means we can now move them. You can click and drag and align the pins to the corners of the screen, which is super cool, I think. Click and drag and align as much as you can to the corners. When you're semi happy with this, you can just press "Enter" and that is your perspective. Now the great news is if you're not entirely happy with this, you can always edit the perspective warp. To do this, you go to the layers panel over here and you'll see perspective warp. If you don't see it, it means that your image wasn't a smart object so you just want to open the image again as a smart object. Now if you double-click on perspective warp, you're back on the black pins, which means that you can edit them again and move them around. Again, press "Enter" when you're happy. 4. Image Adjustements: Awesome. Now, I'm going to show you how to make some minor adjustments to our images, changing things like the brightness or contrast, or colors, adding a blur, which is great for making the image look more realistic. To do this, you have to go to image adjustments and you'll see a whole list of image adjustments. You'll have brightness and contrast and all of these are similar to when you edit an image in Instagram or on your phone. I'd like you to select brightness and contrast and play with the brightness. You'll see the image go brighter or less bright. Light looks more like it's on standby and continue to contrast as well. You have the freedom here, the artistic freedom to play around with this. When you're happy with the way something looks, you click on, "Okay." Again, this can be changed and edited as well over here by double-clicking on brightness and contrast, and again, you can change this. That's great because if you ever make mistakes, you can always edit them. I wish that would exist in real life as well, but hey, now we can go back to image adjustments and you can also change the vibrance, let's say. We can make the colors more vibrant or less vibrant. It will look a little bit more softer, a little bit more washed, and similar with saturation. Again, you've got artistic freedom here, whatever you think looks best. When you're done, click on "Okay." Now, I'm going to show you how to add a blur filter and how to blur this image essentially. This is great because sometimes it will make it look a little bit more realistic as well. We're hitting a few birds with one stone over here. Image adjustments, filters, perspective warp. If we go to filter blur, there is a blur that I like to use called Gaussian Blur, if you select that, you can increase the blur. You'll see it will blur a lot, but that's a bit much. I can make it a tiny bit more blur. Just a little bit. When you're happy with that, you click on "Okay." That is the first image done. Now, I do believe in repetition. We're going to practice this again with another image. 5. Saving & Exporting: Repetition is key here. We're just going to do this whole process again with another image with a screengrab this time. What we'll do actually is we're going to temporarily hide this image. We do this by clicking on the little eye here that you see. If you click on it, it will temporarily hide it just so that it doesn't bother us. Now we're going to repeat this process by going to File, Place Embedded. Again here, this is where you can choose your own screengrab of your website of whatever you would like to display. I might choose this guy over here and click on "Place". Again, you click and drag, and you make it approximately the size that the actual screen will be in. But again, it doesn't have to be perfect. That's okay. When you're done, you press "Enter" or "Return". Then you're going to go to Edit, Perspective Warp, and repeat the whole process. You click and drag define the plane, press "Return", and drag the pins to the corners. Again, when you're done, you press "Return". There's a little edit that needs to happen here. No problem. Don't stress. Just go back to Perspective Warp over here, double-click and just edit the pins accordingly, and Return. You can repeat the whole process that I showed you earlier for image adjustments by going to Image, Adjustments and changing the brightness and the contrast, and the vibrance and etc., and blur. Go back to Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur. Now, of course, feel free to explore all the image adjustments that are here. There are a few of them. You can make it black and white and stuff like that. Have a little play with it and change that in your own time. That's great. We're done with that. Now you can hide this one and then show the other one if you prefer that one. That's really great. If you want to save this image either as a Photoshop file or a JPEG, you have to go to File, Save As, Save on your computer, save somewhere. Save it in this folder. You can either save it as a Photoshop file or a JPEG. Click on "Save". Over here you can change if you want it to be a small file, low quality or large file, high quality. Then click on "Okay". That is our second image done. 6. Perspective Warp: On a Phone Screen: Now let's close this hub by clicking on the little x over here. We're going to repeat this whole process, but with an image of a phone, and we're going to learn a few valuable Photoshop tricks. Let's go to File, open a smart object and this time, select the Instagram post image. Click on Open, there it is. This time it's a portrait image, which means we're going to place a portrait image inside. We're going to go again to File, Place Embedded, and select images from that perspective work folder, and select the lovely lady here with the flowers because it's a portrait image. Of course, feel free to use any image you like and then resize it accordingly and approximately, and then you can press Enter when you're happy. We're going to repeat the process by going to Edit, Perspective Warp. Now, before we move on to doing this, I'm going to show you a little trick that I use at times to make sure that the image is properly aligned. What I use is transparency. I make the image transparent. If you hover over here and you go up, you'll see opacity. Opacity is the opposite of transparency. When it's 100 percent opaque, it means it's not transparent at all. So if you want to make this transparent, you have to reduce the opacity and there we go. You can see it a little bit. Just like so that's enough. Now we're going to go to Edit, Perspective Warp, and define our lovely planes, and press Return or Enter. Now when we line up our planes, it's going to be a little bit easier to see. We're only temporarily making it transparent and over here as well. When we're happy, we can press Return or Enter, and that is our image placed. 7. Layer Mask: Feel free to make it untransparent or completely opaque again to see better. Let's make it transparent again because it's going to be important for our next step. That will be to remove this little corner here, this little piece that we don't need. Now to do this, I'm going to have to show you a few Photoshop tools that are super important and it's called a selection tool. The other is called a layer mask. What we're going to do is select this piece and mask it or hide it. Now there are a few ways of doing this, but first of all, I want us to zoom in a little bit by going to View zoom in or out, or Command or Control Plus, Command for Macs, Control for PCs, to zoom in a little bit, so we can see a little bit better. We're going to use a tool here called the polygonal lasso tool. Quite a hard word to pronounce. What it does is it allows you to make straight edge selections. You can literary draw around something and select it. What I want us to do is not select this piece, but select the rest. Select what we want to see of the image which means that we're going to select this piece of the image and we're not going to select this piece and that will be master hidden. The way to use this is to go click and click and click and click. If you made a mistake and whoops, just press backspace or return, and they will undo the last selection. Click, then what I wanted to do is click and draw the edges approximately of our lovely image and you to close the selection. Click on the point you started with to select it, to close it and now it's a closed selection. Now we're going to use a famous Layer Mask icon. If you click on that, it will hide this piece, which is what we want. Now clearly, we didn't do a good job here, which is absolutely fine. In Photoshop, we can always edit options that we've created, which is awesome. To explain something about the layer mask. The layer mask, if you see here on the thumbnail, you'll see black and white. This is the layer mask. Can you see that this is black and this is white? Whatever is white, you can currently see from the image. Whatever is black is hidden. That means that whatever is here is black because that's hidden and this image is in white. If we wanted to see a little bit more of the image, we're going to have to use a white brush and draw here and this is going to show a piece of the image. If we're going to hide a piece of the image, it needs to be black and that's okay if it's a little bit confusing because it's all new and I'm going to show you how to do this. It will make more sense when we actually do it. First of all, I want you to make sure that you select the Layer Mask icon over here. Secondly, we're going to use the brush tool. A shortcut for the brush tool is B for beautiful brush. Then at the bottom you'll see black and white hopefully. If you don't see it, click on this little tiny here for the default colors. Then over here, you can swap the colors or you can press X. That is the shortcut for switching foreground and background colors. Whatever color is here will be the color of the foreground that you'll be using. If it's black and we draw with a black brush somewhere, this will hide more of the image. If we draw it with a white brush, it will show more. I'm going to give you a couple of tricks for the brush. For your brush to make it bigger, you need to use the right right bracket on your keyboard. To make it smaller, the left square bracket. This is super useful and it works for all kinds of brushes on Adobe Photoshop. Remember, my color is black. That means that now, if I go like this, it's going to hide our lovely lady image which we don't want. We don't want to hide this piece. We want to add more of that lady image over here. We're going to use white instead and we're literally going to draw and click and drag and start drawing here just on the edge, just so we can see a bit better. If you made a mistake, you can always go to edit, undo or commands. Currently it's really hard to tell what's going on because our image is transparent. We're going to make our image not transparent. Go back to opacity and make it not transparent. Now it will be easier to show and see what we need to hide or show here. I want to swap, make it black, and I want to get rid of a tiny bit here. I think I took a bit too much. Just going to click and drag and move a tiny bit here and that was too much so go back to white and you can keep adjusting it until you're happy. Make sure you have a stable hand and you didn't drink too much coffee like I did. Once you're happy you can zoom out, view, zoom out, Command or Control minus and that is our layer mask. 8. Colour & Filters: Now again, feel free to make any adjustments that you need to make. Like adjustments to the perspective work, by double-clicking and moving this up or down. For instance, adjustments to the layer mask by selecting the Layer Mask icon, by going to a brush and adding it with black or white, whatever changes you need to make, make them right now before we move on to the final part of this class. That is adding a filter, making does the same color as the screen. Before we start adding filters, I'm going to show you how to save this color, this little green here, this mint color in your swatches, which is where you save colors, then we can use it. So I want you to click on the green, the mint somewhere here, and you'll see the mint selected over here. Now, if you double-click on this and you click on add to Swatches, can call it mint, the color will now be saved in your swatches, which means that you can reuse this color. If I were to go to swatches, I'll see this color here. Now, I want us to go to image adjustments again. This time we go to photo filter. You'll see currently has a few options, we don't need any of those. If you select a color, it will give you that orange color, which is cool, but it's not what we need. Instead, we're going to swap this color for the green for the mint. I click on this color. Then if you click on that color we've just created here and the mint you click on okay, that meant appears there, which means that it's going to cover our image with a minty color filter. Now you just need to increase the density of this color accordingly to say looks like it's a part of the same image and then you can click on Okay, and that is it. So we've covered a lot in this class. We've covered perspective warp. We've covered how to place images, how to edit the perspective warp with a Smart Object. How to change the saturation, the brightness, the contrast. How to add a blur filter, how to mask a part of the image. This is really a tricky one, but I do cover this in my other classes more in depth how to use a Layer Mask. I'm sure if you do those, you'll feel really confident using the layer mask. We've also covered how to use brushes to edit the Layer Mask and finally a photo filter. I hope you enjoyed this and that you go on and use your own cool images and website and content and use this for graphics in social media or whatever it is that you need it for. As always, it was a pleasure and see you soon. [MUSIC]