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There are many instances when you will want to simulate or mock up how a design would look printed out and photographed. It might be for a portfolio piece, it might be for a client to help them imagine a concept design, or it might just be for your own satisfaction at seeing how your work is going to look to the end user.
In this technique, we’ll use a bit of perspective and the very useful Vanishing Point filter to achieve some great results. I will apply this technique to Collis’ Sample Calling Card from a previous tutorial.
Step 1
First we choose something to be our background for the work. In my case, I chose a wooden table I have in my office. After that get a business card or a square piece of paper to use as reference and take a picture. Without moving the camera, get rid of the piece of paper and take another picture.
Step 2
Now let’s create our Perspective Plane using the Vanishing Point filter (Filters>Vanishing Point). A new window will open with the filter’s settings.
Step 3
Select the Create Plane Tool (C) and start creating a box using the business card as reference. After that, just resize the plane.
Step 4
With our plane done, now lets place our card there.
- Open the image you want to place on the grid. In our case it’s Collis’ card, and press Ctrl+A to select everything and Ctrl+C to copy it.
- Back to our tutorials file, create a new layer and go again to the Vanishing Point filter.
- Inside the filter’s setting box, paste the card.
- Now just move it and resize it until you find the position you like.
Repeat basically the same actions and place the other side of our card.
Step 5
To make our card more real, we will use the Layer Styles. Lets add some Drop Shadows to the front side of the card.
Click the right button of the mouse on the layer, copy the layer style, and paste it to the other side of the card’s layer.
Step 6
Select one of our sides, duplicate the layer, and convert it to a Smart Object. Add a Gaussian Blur (Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur). (Note: if you are not using Photoshop CS3, don’t worry about converting to a Smart Object.) Now just change the Blending Mode to Screen 45%.
Repeat the same steps for the other image.
Step 7
Now let’s organize our document. Try to use layer names that you will remember and group them in cards. After that select everything but the guides, group them again, and name the group "content." Duplicate the group and convert it to a Smart Object.
Step 8
You can stop here, but we’ll keep going a bit further to show you how to add a depth of field effect. With our “Content” Smart Objected selected, select all layers.
- Change the Feather Options to 80px and Anti-alias.
- Create a rectangular selection like the one I did. Invert the selection (Select>Inverse).
- Now Apply a Gaussian Blur again.
Notice that this will create that distance focus effect: everything gets blurry the further away it gets from the focal point.
Step 9
After that you can even apply a Diffuse Glow (Filters>Distort>Diffuse Glow) to make it look more real.
Conclusion
The Vanishing Point filter is definitely an amazing filter and it allows us to preview our work with more realism. The best thing is that it’s really easy to use. You could even place another texture for the table or add more objects to the scene.
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Fake calling cards look fake.
Sweet… tut. I’ll use this at some point, but I wonder if it has other uses. Any ideas?
Good tutorial! Like the tips of using the vanishing tool. But I think the final outcome can be better thou. Picture in step 6 are better than the final imo
I found that the new layout has better readability, like it!
http://abduzeedo.com/perspective-without-the-vanish-point-filter
hey hey.. look at this.. I think there are some similarities
nice tutorial, I think like the card-design one more though.
BUT … you are being ripped ‘ere.
yeah .. sorry.. ignore the other one ..hahaha. .I’m a dumbuser ..sorry. .
sorry. . sorry
@John Grey thanks for linking my blog ;)
Anyways, I wrote 2 tutorials showing how to create the same effect, the only difference is that one uses the Vanishing Point Filter while the other you will have to find those points in order to create the perspective, what is really good if you use other tool like gimp or an old version of photoshop.
Looks great, but when I used the vanish filter and dropped my own stuff in and rotated them around, I got some awful jaggies along the edges. Should I be using higher resolution and drop them in?
Dano (and Rob),
I had the jaggie problem, too! I was dropping in a white business card in GIF format (pretty lo-res, now that I think about it). Did higher resolution do the trick?
I tried selecting the layer content, then using Select>Modify>Border (e.g., 5px) to create a selection along the edge, and then applying Gaussian Blur (e.g., 1.2px) to the selection. But this was only modestly successful.
Spent some more time with this… And here’s the deal: The Vanishing Point filter simply does NOT anti-alias edges on a rotated object (at least not in CS2)… leaving some nasty jagged edges depending on how you rotate your card (also depending on the color of the card–it’s not so noticeable in this tutorial’s dark example, but very noticeable if you use a white business card).
But there’s an elegant solution to this: After placing each business card image in the Vanishing Point filter, add a vector mask to the resulting layer. Use the Pen tool (in path mode) to plot the corner points of a card (a little bit inside the lines), then select its layer and choose Add vector mask. (Use the Direct Selection tool to adjust the mask, if needed.) If done right, the jagged edges will be cut off by the mask, and the result will appear nicely aliased, esp. if viewed at 100%.
I had this problem too. Thanks for suggesting and clearing this up.
really nice tool uh?
Great! But i find the edges too blurry for my taste.
I ran into the same problem, Dano. I’m looking into some solutions, but I think your initial thought may do the trick.
i don’t have this command(vanishing point) in my photoshop, the version is cs, should i have it? if yes! how?
Thanks for this really helpful tutorial.
I wash having problem getting vanishing point filter to work too, Its because it only works with RGB images , you have to convert image to RGB.
FAB tutorial, shame didnt have it last week when I was doing up my portfolio!!
Thanks again
http://www.andystewart-design.com
very nice. just a bit of constructive criticism if I may, there seems a little too much blur, huh??
I just tried it with my own business card ;) Thanks
Great tutorial, but I am working with a predominately white background and whenever I put things into the 3D layer, the image quality goes down considerably. Does anyone know why or how I can fix that?
jmreedy (at) gmail (dot) com
Nice and usually :) Very good idea to do portfolio like that
That’s a really cool tutorial and a really good idea for presenting previews to a client. Good job!
I have PS-cs2 but I don’t have this filter anyone know where it is and if it’s free?
lorehand at wildmail dot com any help would be nice. thanks in advance.
Don’t forget that the filter won’t work if your image is CMYK.
I had forgotten that little chestnut.
Use the filter while your files are RGB, then convert them to CMYK.
Cheers.
Nice tut bro… Keep it gangster.
Nice tut, I skip few steps. I apply a very fine drop shadow duplictae the layer and motion blur them to get the reflection effect like most timber floor reflection.
Hats off dude for the great tutorial. I have learned alotttttttttttt from it.
Awesome tutorial. It definitely taught me a thing or two about designing a business card. But I’m not that good at designing, which is why I got my designer from logodesignplanet.com to design me one and it turned out better than expected. Moreover, it was affordable as well. Save me all the time and trouble… Haha. Thanks for posting this by the way.
Cool! Very useful.
Thanks
Cool! Very useful.
Thanks
My method to compensate for the jagged vanishing point quirk is to 1) set the resolution/dimensions has high as you can 2) perform the vanishing point process 3) reduce the resolution which then applies filtering to the layer and gives it an anti aliased effect.
Another technique to deal with jagged vanishing point layers, is to make a selection of the layer, click ‘Refine Edge’ from the ‘Select’ drop down menu and apply some ‘Smooth’. The amount can depend on the size of the image but on smaller images you won’t need more than ’1′ unit of smoothing. Apply the new selection as a mask.
Nice tutorial, but if you group the layers into a SO (smart object), the VP (vanishing point) goes out of synch with the item(s) that were pasted onto it, and the content can’t be edited properly. This is true of CS2 and CS3, not sure if has been subsequently fixed in CS4/5.