Since I’m at Photoshop World in Las Vegas this week, I figured that I should post something Photoshop related. They showed us a cool new feature that is going to be in the next version of Photoshop in our opening keynote. I’m going to try and describe it as best I can, but it might be difficult without some sort of visual… but I’m going to try.
The new tool is a perspective tool. If you’ve got a photo of a something going off into the distance, the example they used was a hallway/art gallery. There was a wood floor, but they wanted to use the clone tool to remove something from the floor. Unfortunately, the perspective of the floor moving into the distance (wider boards to smaller boards) made it difficult to clone something from the clean portion of the floor (smaller and farther back) to the dirty part of the floor (larger and closer). This new perspective tool (or whatever it ends up being called) allows you to place a perspective grid on the floor, wall, or whatever you’re working on. Once this is set anything you do in that area will happen at the right size based on the perspective grid.
A really cool example they used in their art gallery demo was a painting on the wall in front was copied and moved around the corner to an area where they had the grid and it automatically changed the shape of the layer to take the correct perspective of whatever area you were placing it into. It was pretty cool!
They didn’t give any indication of when this would be out or even if it would be in the next version of Photoshop… definitely something to look forward to.
Update: I found out a little more about this new feature. It is actually called “Vanishing Point.” I’m not sure if it will be called that in the final version or not. One of the workshop instructors was the same guy who did the demo of vanishing point in the opening keynote presentation. The class, as a group, was able to talk him into doing a more in depth demo of the new feature. I was able to snap a (LOW res) camera phone picture of the demo. I enhanced it a little bit since some of the features are hard to see in the photo. I outlined the perspective grid in green. Once you lay out the first perspective grid, you can pull the edges up to cover more areas of the photo. In this demo photo, the instructor created the grid on the floor, but dropping in the four corner points and doing some small (drag and drop) adjustments and then was able to drag the grid up on the back and side walls keeping the same perspective. Once the grid is set, you can copy and paste, or use the clone tool in the gridded areas and everything you clone or move will automatically take the correct perspective of the area you place it in. If this doesn’t make any sense… take my word for it, it’s really cool!
I also learned that the new version of Photoshop will be announced “soon.” The instructors, ones who were either writing a book about it, or worked for Adobe, let a few things slip. Your guess to what “soon” means is as good as mine.
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