Time saving - Photoshop Perspective Tool

I just thought I'd do a full post on the perspective tool in photoshop, and explain a little bit more about how and why I am saving so much more time after discovering it. I had been previously working out my backgrounds by hand, using general perspective techniques such as creating vanishing points and horizon lines for the desired angles. This technique is definitely reliable but unless you have ample experience with perspective in general, it takes a lot of time to calculate where your vanishing points are. Another reason this takes time is because a lot of the time when working out vanishing points, these points can be well off your page and you therefore need to create a much larger document to work out your perspective lines.

This is because all of your lines have to meet that vanishing point, and it helps to be able to see it at all times especially if what you are drawing is very linear. So until you are finished calculating your perspective you will need to be working in a larger size document, before cropping it down to the require size.

With the perspective tool it eliminates a lot of these problems because not only does it work out the perspective for you, in doing so it automatically creates a preview window that is bigger than your document. You can also come in and out of this preview mode when ever you wish to use the perspective tool to work. However you still need to be aware of the general principles of perspective to be able to work out your vanishing points. This is especially true when designing a scene from your head and you have no real life perspective guides go by for a vanishing point.

Once I've use the tool for a basic set up, I can take advantage of the warp tool to exaggerate my perspective and make the work less linear. With earlier background paintings, I spent a lot to time working this out freehand, so this is a big time-saver now that I've really got to be geting on with things.  The Vanishing tool has also been useful when appropriating textures to apply to my paint compositions. Painting something as intricate as brickwork can be a very tedious task but can be rectified with a simple texture as an overlay over a painted layer. This allows me to concentrate more on depth and values rather than detail or before detail.

This is the video link I found which demonstrates the perspective tool and help me to start using it. The image used provides nice simple guides for working out the perspective planes.