When You "Missed It By That Much"

[Jay Beckman]

Shooting from Cheyenne Ave during Red Flag 14-1, I managed to catch a really nice underside shot of one of the MO Strike Eagles climbing out in really good light:


But something kept bugging me until it finally dawned on me that I didn't get right on his centerline!
Note how the vertical line starts to the camera left of the nose but ends up crossing camera right of the tail:


Photoshop CS6 CC now has a "Perspective Warp" tool that allows you to practically change the angle while maintaining the proportions.
This was literally apply the Perspective grid across the entire image, grab the upper left corner and pull it left, and then grab the lower right corner and pull it to the right until things lined up as though I were directly underneath!


So the next time you run like hell to the approach path and don't quite get there, don't panic!  There's a way to tweak that POV!

(Lesser versions of Photoshop can still do this using the regular Transform tools, but you'll have to nudge and tweak more to maintain the proportions.)

[Joe Copalman]

That's actually pretty fascinating, but there's still a lot of residual asymmetry.  Still pretty damned cool though.

[Jay Beckman]

I think to get it 110% correct all around, you'd need to go to Puppet Warp which allows you to reposition about 100+ individual points worth of a lattice grid.

I opened the corrected version in LR and discovered I actually hadn't cropped it for center.  After doing so, no feature on one side of the airframe misses its opposite number by more than about 1/3 of a grid box.
That's pretty stout considering it was a 15 second process using only two handles and letting PS do the math!

Cropped For Centering...