Creating Visual Effects - Change Perspective

(Page 7 of 11 )

See Also

• Straighten an Image
• Crop a Portion of an Image
• Remove Unwanted Objects from an Image
• Move, Alter, or Distort a Layer

There will be times when you cannot face your subject head on and take a picture. Perhaps you tried to photograph a building from across the street, but to get all of the building in the photo, you had to stand off to one side so that you could step back far enough. The trouble is, you'd rather have a shot of the building looking straight at it. Luckily, you have Paint Shop Pro, and its Perspective Correction tool can fix just such an image.

The Perspective Correction tool works in a manner similar to the Straighten tool discussed in Straighten an Image. When you click the tool, a rectangle bounding box appears. Place the four nodes of this box on the corners of the object whose perspective you want to correct, and Paint Shop Pro makes the appropriate adjustments. For example, you could place the nodes on the four corners of the front wall of the building whose image you want to correct, and after you click Apply, Paint Shop Pro adjusts the wall (and everything else in the image) by the exact same amount so that the wall ends up facing you straight on. To help you line up the nodes correctly, you can display additional gridlines within the bounding box.

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Note - If you take a picture looking up instead of straight ahead (for images of tall objects such as buildings or monuments), you'll also get perspective distortion.

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1. Select Perspective Correction Tool

   On the Layer palette, change to the layer you want to straighten. On the Tools toolbar, click the Perspective Correction tool. A bounding box appears on the image. To display additional gridlines, change the Grid lines value on the Tool Options palette.

2. Arrange Nodes

   Drag each of the four nodes on the corners of the bounding box and place them on the four corners of the object you want to adjust.

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   Note - After the image perspective is changed, empty areas will appear along the sides of the image. You can have PSP crop the image for you by enabling the Crop image check box on the Tool Options palette. Alternatively, you can use the Clone Brush tool as explained in Remove Unwanted Objects from an Image to "paint in" the empty areas with colors and details from other parts of the photograph.

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3. Click Apply

   Click Apply. PSP adjusts the perspective of the image. If you did not select the Crop image option to have PSP automatically crop the adjusted image, the areas created by the changes are filled with the current background color.

4. View the Result

   My niece, Caitlin, recently appeared in her 8th grade's production of Music Man. My brother, Mike, brought his camera to record the event, but because he didn't want to disturb anyone in the audience, he stood off to one side. Using the Perspective Correction tool, I was able to change the perspective of the stage so that the resulting image looked as if he had stood right in front of the stage.

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Note - You can also change the perspective of an image if you know the exact angle of adjustment you want. Select Effects, Geometric Effects, Perspective — Horizontal or Perspective — Vertical.

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Figure 15.7

This chapter is from Paint Shop Pro 8, by Jennifer Fulton, (Sams, 2004, ISBN: 0672323893). Check it out at your favorite bookstore today. Buy this book now.

Next: Move, Alter, or Distort a Layer >>
 

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