Affinity Photo - 4 Perspective Tools explained

Key Takeaways

today I'm going to show you the perspective tools in affinity photo hello my friends and let's get started so the first thing you want to do when using a perspective tool is select the layer that you want to edit make sure it's in pixel not as an image layer and a good idea is to duplicate this layer because the perspective tool is destructive so you can't really go back from there you can undo it but it's better to make a copy from the original file so we have a copied layer now and we will click over here on the left to perspective tool where we have single plane you can see it's just a single grid and we have dual plane so we will look at dual plane first and dual plane is two modes one is the source mode and the other one is a destination mode the source mode allows us to set the two points in the middle to the correct position for the perspective we don't need to touch the outer points it doesn't have the grid doesn't have to fit the building it's a bit strange it's a bit counterintuitive but this is how it works in affinity photo so let's just set the points along the edge of our building you can zoom in and out by holding ctrl and using your mouse wheel there we go and now if we switch to the destination mode you can see that the software is straightening out the line in the middle and we get a little bit of a clipping arrow down here that we will fix in a second but what we can do right now because we on destination mode is that we can use these two points to click and drag them and move the building around to find a new perspective that maybe we might like more in the picture so I will go maybe with this so it's a bit more dramatic there we go and now I can zoom in to correct our problem down here with the clipping and now we will touch the outer points so I will take this point and move it around and it moves very strangely so you have to get used to it a little bit but it's not too hard let's see this looks good yeah this is okay so let's click on apply' there we go by the way what you see here is this other clipping is the original layer from the background so actually here this part is empty from the picture but you can see now that we have a completely new perspective in the picture let's compare this this was the original building and this is the new building that we have created with the new perspective so this is a really really interesting tool that you can use as a change form a perspective with two points or two planes to rearrange two perspective in the picture okay the second thing that we are going to look at is single plane perspective which you can use in two different ways and is also very very interesting let's make a text called a test and now when you click on the perspective tool keep in mind that this will change the text layer into a pixel layer so you can't change the text afterwards we click on this and we can zoom in with the mouse wheel and now what you can do as the first and I think most used application of this single plane is to just stretch the text into the perspective of the building to make it look like it's on top or on the side of the building I'm not gonna work with the shadow or the light situation right now I'm just gonna show you how the perspective tool works you can by the way you can always click here on show grid disable that so you hide the grid and have a better view of what is going on in the picture and you can see that this really nicely puts the text on the front of the building so this is a very easy way to use this another way and this is the third way I'm going to show you four perspective tool let's delete this and click on the source layer here is that you can go up here two layers and it says live protection and you have a perspective projection so let's click on this and again we get a grid and now we will adjust all of the four points to fit the building and this will create for us a 2d flat projection of the surface which is a really interesting tool it's kind of limited I would wish it to be a lot better than it is but it's still a good tool and you can be really creative with that so let's prepare this really quickly there we go over here last point there we go very nice okay now the only thing you have to do is click up here onto your move tool and it will turn the side of the building into a 2d flat picture which is very nice you could use this with your clone brush to move things around to copy things inside of this layer you can also use of course your normal paintbrush to just paint onto the surface let's just make a circle and maybe also a box there we go so you can just see the effect that it's having onto the picture to control what you're doing you can click again on the move tool and click on edit live projection so you see a preview of what is going on there you go and if you are happy with your result you can go up here onto layer live projection and click on remove projection and this will render what you have done before into the picture went on to the plane in a prospectively correct fashion the problem that I have with this thing is that it is not like the smart layers in Photoshop so you can't use any other layers and you can't combine any layers into this perspective projection the only thing you can do is manipulate pixels on that layer which is very limited you can't even put text on there because it will not be put into the perspective afterwards the only way you could be yeah use text on here is to make a outline selection and then paint the pixels onto the layers so it's a kind of not so good solution but still a very nice tool so there is now another way to use perspective tool for this I have another picture and you can see here it's a nice photograph of a room but we have two problems that the lines are in perspective so they get smaller the higher the building goes the higher the room goes but we want to have straight lines in the picture so again we go and select the layer and the first thing you want to do is make some guidelines so just make your ruler on the outside visible go to view and here it says show ruler so this is important that you have it on show rulers and you make some guidelines to help you along and set them roughly where the start is or the lower part is of the line that you want to correct so I set one here and I will set another one here and I will set another one here there we go and now I click again on the perspective tool so we get this grid here you can hide the grid like I said if you want to there we go and now I will take the upper two points and move them outwards and maybe also take the lower ones and move them inwards until the lines are straight in a fashion that I want to have in my picture you see I will try to use this guideline to show me where this will be straight when this will be straight you know and the other one here too and of course over here we have another one so we you have to go a little bit back and forth until you actually get the result that you want because if you move this of course the rest of the picture also moves so it's a little bit of a fight between the two sides in a sense of correcting the perspective there we go but we are getting along nicely here let's see move this out a little bit more and now we have to correct this one again on this side there we go this looks pretty okay maybe leave the lower part in a little bit you can see we're getting really close to a good result there we go the left side looks good of course you lose a little bit from the picture down here and down here but you can use the in paintbrush maybe to adjust this so I think for now this looks good enough to give you the idea of how this works we can now also remove our guide lines and you can see that we have a lot of straight lines now in the picture and it looks a lot nicer than before let's use the in paintbrush a little bit to see if we can correct the errors that we have down here or if we just okay this works pretty good if we cut it away which is also an option oh okay just didn't work too good let's see nope nope okay let's try this side here the in paintbrush is not always the best solution I've got to say it could be better and some times but you can see here it also sometimes gives you pretty good solutions for that and again we can also use our cutting tool to cut away a little bit of the parts that are it didn't work out too well for us so let's make it like this okay and there we go we have a picture with straight lines again let's pull in our help lines and you can see these are pretty straight this is pretty straight that one back here is also pretty straight and the one over here is also pretty straight so we have changed the picture a lot in the way it's looking is looking a lot more stable okay so these are the different uses of perspective tools or better said our intro to the users of respective tools thank you for watching I hope you like my videos I make a new video every three days so subscribe if you like my content and if you want to me even more head over to patreon and check out my different rewards like my original files with all the layers you can live chat with me and I will give you feedback on your works ok see you soon and have a nice day bye