Vanishing point - cloning & healing at an angle in Photoshop

Hi there, this video is all about using Vanishing Point to do some tricky stuff where we need to remove these lights along the top, but there's some weird perspective going on. We need to repeat this part down at this weird perspective, and then Vanishing Point comes along, helps us out, gets us 80% of the way there anyway. There's a little bit of fixing up to do, but let's explore how to use Vanishing Point, to clone and heal at weird perspectives. 

To get started, in '10 Retouching' folder, grab 'Vanishing Point 3'. Let's say our problem is here, we want to remove these lights. For what reason? I didn't know, but it's a really good use of Vanishing Point. Let's just say the architect, the interior designer didn't like them anymore, or let's say it's graffiti or rubbish, or something other than lights, we just need to get rid of them, even a person. So like we did in the last one, we need to set up, it's probably best to work on its own new layer. Then we go to 'Filter', and go to 'Vanishing Point'. And we need to tell it the plane, so in this case I want to kind of click here. Here. Here, it's pretty easy because there's, you know a reasonable kind of Vanishing Point lines to follow. It's harder when it's just like natural ground. Works so much good with, like structural architecture type stuff. Click once, and it's gone red, because it says, there's no chance, it's a flat object. 

So what I didn't do is I didn't-- I just kind of used the top up here and guessed it. So what I'm going to do is drag it down, these corners. So that I use what I think is a, it's not perpendicular, I want-- the word is at a right angle, that will do. So I know that kind of crosses across there. Once you get it and you've used something in the object, to get your right angle maybe, is I can drag it out by grabbing the middle one. So now that is-- it says it's blue, it says, I believe you, I trust you, and that is what you say it is. Now what you could do is, I could do this other plane here. I can hold down 'Command' key and drag that middle dot to make a new wall, but what I find is it's easy to work on one plane, and then the other plane afterwards. Otherwise your Clone Tool stamping ends up running down the walls, and it looks a bit weird. 

The other thing to know is, say we spend some time giving this Vanishing Point plane to look nice, I find I just click 'OK', then go back into it, then it's committed to the history, because Vanishing Point has a tendency of crashing. Just been my experience. So at least when it crashes now my plane is still here. It's been half an hour in here, retouching, and it crashes. I have to go back and set up my plane, and ah, painful. So what we're going to do is, we're going to use this here, it's called the Stamp Tool. Basically it's a mixture of the Clone Tool Stamp. That's not the word, it's called the Clone Stamp Tool or the Healing Brush Tool. They're one and the same. Basically you can turn Healing on and off here. So with it off, it's just the Clone Tool Stamp, with it on it starts blending colors. In this case I want Healing to be 'on'. And in terms of the alignment, depending on what you want to do, I want it off in this instance, I'll show you why. 

So in terms of brushes I'm going to have mine at about 150, hardness at 50, copy that, for yours in this exercise. And the first thing we need to do is set a target. So setting a target is like the other tools. You hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, the 'Alt' key on a PC. You can give it a click somewhere where you want to get started. So I'm going to say, you there. What you'll see is, see the green target? That's where it's stealing from. The cool thing about is, watch this, when I just kind of move my mouse down, I'm not doing anything, just kind of move my mouse, you can see, the Perspective changes, and that's what makes this thing perfect. What makes this thing grateful, like stealing content from here, and pasting it down here, because if you spend time and line it up, this is going to be always everyone's biggest problem, is lining this up, so I'm going to get this to here, line it up. Moving my mouse around, click and drag. Cool, huh? It seems to blend in nicely. 

This brings this to this aligned. With it on, watch this, if I click and drag, and then let go, and click and drag again, you see, it's kind of starting where I left it. So the green cross keeps starting back there, and that might be fine, but there's lots of occasions where you turn that off. I'm going to undo a few times. Because what I want to do is, I'm going to say, I want you to steal because this is my only real good chunk that doesn't have any lights in it, everything else is a bit weird. So what I want to do is click, hold, and drag. And when I let go, it goes back, see the green cross, goes back to there. So I'm going to go back to that originally sampled layer bit, I line it up again. This lining up is going to always be the downfall of this. Now, I'm not going left and right, I should. Left and right, don't go up because it's getting the edge. Can you see that, I guess that's an important point, if I go up, you can see, my green cross eventually gets close to the edge, and I end up with this kind of weird line that appears on the top there. 

So I'm just going to make sure I work down, and I might use a slightly bigger brush. So I'm going to start there. Actually, no, I'm going to start again and paint over the top. And just go wiggle back and forth a little bit, I'm getting both the lines. Here you go, let go. It's not so you let go before it starts blending things in. Don't go up, I just told you that, Dan. So I'm going to grab this bit here just to fix this bit in here, a bit of Blending Mode awesomeness. Don't go up. Just go down. I can do this. See those bits over here? I set the target over here, try and get the line to line up. You can start to see I've got a bit of duplication going on. I guess it's just one of the, not the pros or cons, just you're going to be a bit more careful than I'm being. 

I'm going to try and fix it up by going over the top of it, trying to get the spacing right. So you paint down, about there. I'm going to set up another one about here. And one more down here. I'm going to try and get this last little bit here. Get everything to line up. Cool. Same with these guys, I'm going to set a target up here, try and line it up. And backs it out. Keep an eye on both your cursor, you can see the Perspective line hasn't quite perfectly got it here. So I might just use a smaller brush, I'm not kind of destroying this too much. It's fiddly. I'm not going to lie to you. I picked a really fiddly example. Wish I just picked a brick wall like everyone else does. Architectural lines, a lot tougher. People are going to notice. Smaller brush. Pretty good. 

These guys here, I can't really get rid of those lines in Vanishing Point, because there was no, like there was none of these that didn't have one. So I'm going to click 'OK', because it's on its own layer, I'm going to kind of turn this on and off and see. Is it brilliant? Yes, that's pretty good. Is it photo realistic? Probably not. But what I'm going to do is, I am going to use, say something like the Spot Healing Brush to tidy this up. Spot Healing Brush, maybe the Patch Tool. The only problem with the Patch Tool, is that this is on its own layer, which is quite cool, but the Patch Tool doesn't work when there are two separate layers. So I select both of these, and hit 'Command E', 'Ctrl E' to merge them together, or go to 'Layer', 'Merge Layers'. And now these guys need a bit of work. So I use my Lasso Tool to grab this. Go to my Patch Tool, find somewhere that I like. Just kind of work my way through fixing these guys up. It's not perfect, it's way better than trying to do it with 'Edit', 'Transform'. What you can do now is go back into Vanishing Point, and work out this last plane, and see if you can duplicate this across a few times. Now I'll do that. 

Last thing we should do is this last plane here, there's a weird light hanging across it. So we're going to go to, own layer, go to Vanishing Point. I'm going to hold the 'Command' key down and grab this plane. I'm going to click on this plane and hit 'Delete', actually 'Back space' to get rid of it. It's got rid of the whole thing, it's okay, put you in. Doesn't like it, sees yellow. Sorry, buddy. That's not a wall, you can see why, that's not great. Cool. Looks better. Awesome. I'm going to grab my 'Clone Tool Stamp'. I probably go okay, then come back in, let's do it. It fills the Vanishing Point just in case it dies. And I'm going to try and replicate this over and over again over here. I have to make it just a tiny bit smaller, because I don't want to bring in the lines from above. 'Clone Tool Stamp', I want you. Trying to bring it down a little bit so it's not grabbing the edge. A bit bigger. I might just tidy it up a little bit further across. You, I'm going to try and paint you into here. And with the Healing Brush on, it's going to try and blend that white that was there. So I'm going to turn it off.

I just want the good old Clone Tool Stamp, because the colors are blending pretty good. I grab this bit, set a target. A bit that way, bit that way. Grip the middle bit. Here's some updates. Now that I've got all these colors in here, I might go and grab 'Healing Brush' on to get it to blend in. Now I can see bits of white kind of poking through. So it's probably going to blend it. See it's kind of yanking bits of the lights out. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to grab my 'Selection Tool', and just make sure that this isn't just a little bit lower. Now using my Clone Tool Stamp, I'm going to say, you. I'm going to try and make that bit nicer. This bit here as well. Beautiful. Let's click 'OK'. It's on its own layer, and we have fixed the roof. You can see how the Vanishing Point got us 80% there, 90% there. Some touch-ups with the Patch Tool or the Spot Healing Brush. 

So that is Vanishing Point. It has some quirks, add it to your toolkit of Photoshop awesomeness, but as we saw here, needed a little bit of extra love. Maybe the Spot Healing Brush, the Patch Tool. But it can be super helpful for getting that kind of big stuff locked in. All right, on to the next video.