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Stephen Farnow, author of Photoshop – Just the Skinny, explains how the software can help decorate your home.
Okay, Photoshop won’t really decorate your home – although it was responsible for creating much of the alien world of Pandora in the blockbuster movie Avatar.
But what the program can do is help you visualize changes you are contemplating, whether they be major remodelling, like hanging a new garage door, or minor projects, like hanging a collection of photographs. No, Photoshop won’t do the work for you. But it can help you avoid having to do the work twice to get it right.
Installing a garage door
Let’s say you want to replace a garage door and you need to make decisions regarding style and colour. The pictures your installer will show you will be helpful, but not as helpful as seeing what a given door would look like on your home. With Photoshop, you can see exactly what it would look like.
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To start, you’ll need a home picture from a vantage point where the garage door can be seen. You even might want to do this from the street, if the garage is visible from there, to get an idea of curb appeal.
Second, you’ll need electronic images of the doors you’re considering. (You can scan your installer’s pictures or even download them from their website. Or take pictures of other garage doors you like.)
Next, merge all of these images together in Photoshop. The trick is to put each of the images on a different Photoshop layer, with your home photo on the top. Think of a layer as being a transparent sheet you can paste things on (digitally speaking). By erasing the existing garage door from your home image and laying each new door layer to fit that opening, you can see, one by one, exactly how each new door would look. You can even alter a door’s colour to better match your existing colour scheme. Your final decision will be based on having seen the winning combination, not guesswork.
Hanging photographs
This is another decorating dilemma that is simplified when you can better visualize the outcome. If you have Photoshop, you’ve no doubt created some pretty amazing images and might want a wall grouping. Or perhaps you want to create a family photo gallery. But how many photos should you have? How should they be arranged? How about frame style? Size? And which images should go where? Lots and lots of questions...
As with the garage door project, the secret is to make use of Photoshop layers. Take a picture of your wall, this time putting it on the bottom layer. Take a separate picture of your photo frame and, in Photoshop, erase the background. Place this on a new layer above the wall picture and duplicate it for additional frames. Each frame can then be tweaked to change its size and location, allowing you to create the entire grouping. And if you don’t like the result, you can just move the frames around until you get the arrangement you want.
You don’t need to stop there. You can import the images you plan to print and frame, loading each on its own layer. Then you can scale each picture to the size of a frame and digitally place it in the frame by just dragging it there.
As you get more advanced, you can even take your wall image from an angle and then use Photoshop’s Vanishing Point filter to add proper perspective to your frames. You can see it all before the first nail pierces your wall.
Landscaping
Take a digital camera to your local nursery and snap photos of all the plants that might work. Then come home and digitally “plant” them in an image of your garden in Photoshop. (No watering required!)
A little up-front planning will make your job even easier. While at the nursery, try to take your plant picture against a contrasting background, perhaps the side of a building. This will make the job of erasing its background much simpler.
As with the photo grouping, your garden photo should be your bottom layer with the new plant, or plants, each on a layer, above it. Your plant images may look oversized, of course. Just scale them to size using something in your garden picture as a frame of reference. Then move them around until you’re satisfied with the result. All with clean fingernails.
Carpentry
You want a new built-in bookcase, but how many shelves and what kind of spacing might look best? Take a picture of the planned location and include a ruler or something with a known dimension. Now you can use Photoshop to draw in your shelves, changing spacing until you’re pleased, and then take measurements off the winning design (with the ruler as a guide).
Take another picture of some books. (You have some, right? After all, you are building bookshelves...) Erase the background and use these books to fill up your shelves. (Yes, it will look like you have twenty copies of War and Peace, but you get the idea.) Check it all out and get it right before you even pull out a sawhorse.
Stephen Farnow, author of Photoshop – Just the Skinny, spent 30 years in management at high-tech companies such as Texas Instruments and Intel.