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I'm trying to achieve the effect shown below, but with a photograph and I'm having some trouble maintaining the height width ratio so the photograph doesn't look too distorted - can anyone offer any tips or tutorials?

Thanks in advance for your help.

alt text

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3 Answers 3

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To make that perspective effect look natural you would first have to stretch the right part of the image and compress the left part of the image:

+---------------+    +-------------+
|   |   |   |   |    | |  |   |    |
|   |   |   |   | -> | |  |   |    |
|   |   |   |   |    | |  |   |    |
+---------------+    +-------------+

Then you can just deform the image by moving the left corners togehter.

If you look at the example image that you posted, you can see that this hasn't been done there, so the left half of the image looks stretched. It's not as obvious on that image, as the left half only contains text, but on a photo the effect gets more visible.

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  • I don't think this is really true. The perspective deformation in most raster image editors will correctly do the compression as part of the transform, so you shouldn't do it manually before hand.
    – naught101
    Jul 14, 2013 at 9:03
  • @naught101: It's true. If you have a real perspective deformation tool in the software, then it's not a problem, and you don't experience this problem at all. If you do the perspective deformation manually, then you need to stretch the image as I described in the answer to get a realistic result.
    – Guffa
    Jul 14, 2013 at 12:37
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If you are using Photoshop CS6 Extended (or even Photoshop CS5 Extended) you can convert your 2D layer into a 3D layer (Postcard) then you can move the camera to any position you'd like without destroying the bitmap information... you can even edit the 3D Postcard source (your file) and update it, and the 3D view will update automatically. Super simple.

More to the point, if you are doing this for a website, create an Action that just takes a selected layer, Convert to 3D Postcard and then position the Camera/Current View to where you like it, then stop and save the action. Then, for new images that you want to add to the website (that follow the same look), just open the image and run the action. Simple! All of your artwork will look the same. When you want to change the camera angle, just re-record that step in the Action. This provides you with a non-destructive and fully-editable workflow. Cheers!

More information on Photoshop's 3D features can be found at: http://www.photoshop.com/products/photoshop/3d

Example: I quickly took a screenshot of this page and then made a 3D Postcard...

enter image description here

Then I rotated it 45°...

enter image description here

Then I changed it to 60°, moved the camera in close, and set the "in-camera" Depth of Field...

enter image description here

All in just a few minutes, but only in Photoshop CS6 Extended. So, if you like the examples, +1 my answers. (^_^) Cheers!

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That should be easily done with software like Photoshop or Gimp. You can see a good tutorial here.

Although I don't think this is exactly what you asked for, it is complete tutorial.

This is for shadow perspective in Gimp.

Another one, but for Adobe Illustrator.

Something that I can tell you is to compress the image progressively but not exaggerate the effect. In that case, you will get a more unreal result, and also a very distorted photo.

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