One of our readers outlined a problem a lot of architects, and probably interior designers sometimes, when they have the image of an existing house their clients want to renovate or just want to add some small improvements, like a driveway texture, or a different color or material for the facade, and want to deliver a fast result.
This step-by-step tutorial will show you how to edit an image in Photoshop CS5 (earlier versions work just fine) so then your clients can see the improvements they want on their house, and so they can compare the proposed situation with the existing one, and decide on a solution.
1. First you want to open the image you want to edit. In this case was a one story house with vinyl sidings as our reader wanted to know how he can make the adjustments we talked about in the beginning.
2. After you’ve opened the image, you want to make it a Editable Layer. You can do this by double clicking on the Layer on the right called Background, and in the following window click OK.
3. Open the texture file you want to add as a texture to the driveway, and click on the Rectangle Selection Tool, then in the upper menu click on Select and then All.
You then want to define this selection as a patter. In order to do so, go to Edit and then Define Pattern.
4. Create a New file, and set it’s dimensions to match the ones of the original file, in our case the vinyl siding house.
5. Right Click on the Layer of the newly created file, and select Blending Options, and then click on Pattern in the Layer Options window. There you can select a pattern from the existing ones, and also there you will find the pattern you defined in step 3. You have the option to scale the pattern up or down. After adjusting the scale (if you need or want to adjust it) click OK.
6. You need to return to the original image of the house, and select the area of the image you want the driveway to appear on. In our case is the driveway to the garage. For a clear and fast selection you can use the Quick Selection Tool from the toolbox on the left.
When you’re satisfied with your selection, go to the upper Menu, click on Layer and then on Layer via Cut. A new layer will be created from the selection you just made. You should hide that layer by clicking on the small eye on the left side of the Layer’s name.
7. You need to go back to the New file you created in step 4 and that you’ve added the pattern to in step 5 and Click and drag on it’s name so that you can see at the same time the patterned file and the original image of the house in the same screen. After that you will want to drag the layer of the patterned file into your original image. You can have a better understanding of the process from the following images.
8. Now that you have the textured driveway in the same file as our image, all you need to do is to give it a perspective look, so it can fit into the original image. But first you need to drag the pattern layer under the original image. The process is depicted below.
9. Before we go any further, you want to convert the patterned layer into a Smart Object in order to be able to have the perspective effect on it. You will right-Click on the Layer and then select Convert to Smart Object.
10. Now we need to transform this Layer so it goes into perspective and make it look as natural as possible. To do that, you need to click on Edit in the upper menu, and then Free Transform or Ctrl+T on the keyboard. Holding down Ctrl(PC) or Command(MAC) on the keyboard and dragging the corners of the layer you can obtain the perspective look you can see in the following image. Also you can reposition the layer wherever you please while in Free Transform mode (no need to hold down CTRL or Command for that).
11. When happy with the look of the driveway hit Enter on the keyboard and the changes will stay permanent. For a little more realism, I’ve added a Gradient in the Blending Options of this layer, in order to have a little variation in color and shadow.
This is how the original image now looks like:
12. Now for the facade part, you can use the Smart Selection Tool again, and after that create a new layer out of your selection via Copy. The steps for creating a new layer out of a selection were described above, so that process will not be depicted again.
This is how the selection can look on the original image:
13. In the Blending Options of the new Layer you can add a Color Overlay option and see the result of the changes on your image.
These are the options we used for this house facade.
The final image of the house with the new driveway and the new color on the facade are now done, and they look pretty realistically, so now you can edit any image with the processes described above.
In addition you can create a new Layer out of the facade selection by Cutting it, and then importing a new pattern and transforming that to have the desired perspective, but of course, that is something we can explain in a different tutorial.
Hope you enjoyed this tutorial, and it was enough in depth for everybody to be able to follow along. If at any point you get lost or confused, don’t hesitate to leave a question.
As usual, your feedback is very much appreciated.
P.S. Good luck Ken.
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