Photoshop 3D 'Projection' Effect

Today we learned how to do a neat projection effect on Photoshop. The effect consists of making an image look 3D, and it also makes the 3D image look like it is coming out of a mobile phone.

The 2 images we used to create this effect was a picture of a mobile phone laying on a table and a sheep in a field with a dog on top of the sheep. This effect best works using an image with a main subject, in a background that can be easily distinguishable from the subject, and a background that Photoshop can read to create 'smart fill' with it, an option I will go over later on in the blog post. We placed the phone on the table as the background for this project, with the sheep in the field positioned on top of the phone.

First of all, we used the magic wand tool, and then subject select to create a cut out of the dog and the sheep, and we copied this to a new layer.

We then selected the original image of the sheep and the dog in the field, and turned down the opacity, so that we could see the edge of the phone. We then selected the polygonal lasso tool, and traced around the edge of the phone screen. This created a selection of the original image of the sheep and dog in the field. I then got the eraser tool and erased the parts that weren't in the selection. From this point, I now had a dog on a sheep within a phone screen, with the sheep coming out of the phone as well.

I then needed to fill in the rest of the phone screen with grass, in the parts that weren't covered already by the sheep in the field. I again used the polygonal lasso tool and made a shape of the areas that were not covered, but I made sue to make the shape bigger than needed, so that I also clipped a bit of the grass in the shape, this is because I needed to use edit < content aware fill. This tool fills in the selected area using content also inside of the selection, in this case, there was grass within the selection so it filled in the rest of the selection with grass.

I now have the completed image of the sheep projection out of a phone, but there were a few finishing touches we made. First of all, I added a lens flare effect by going to Filter < Render < Lens Flare, and choosing a suitable lens flare. I positioned it in the corner of the screen and erased some parts and adjusted it so it was subtle. The final touch was to apply a shadow to the sheep. The easiest was to do this was to make a copy of the outlined sheep layer and first of all changing the levels on the sheep, to no white levels, so the sheep was completely black. I then changed the overlay to screen and lowered the opacity so it looked like a shadow. I then positioned the shadow using CTRL+ T and the CTRL again when trying to reposition it, so I could morph it to the correct shape.

You can use this effect in many different ways, and there were lots of tips and tricks I learned from this lesson, involving easily cutting out images, lens flares, smart filling areas and how to make easy shadows. Other instances where you could use this effect is for advertising mobile games or mobile functions. Or perhaps television adverts or movie adverts.