Photoshop is an amazing bit of software that many designers use on a daily basis. It’s such a flexible bit of kit that you could spend a week learning new features, and still have only scratched the surface of what’s possible.

Once you’ve overcome the beginners’ learning curve, however, there are some real gems hidden inside Photoshop that can help you speed up your work and get more out for less effort. Here we’ve rounded up 30 of the best Photoshop secrets to help sharpen your skills and improve your productivity.

• See all our Photoshop articles here

01. Control your panels

In the top right hand corner of every panel is a little icon that reveals a fly-out menu, giving additional options that you might not have seen before. You can use this menu to set your layer panel thumbnails to be larger, crop to artwork and much more – experiment!

02. Paste in Place

Paste in Place is one of those functions that you’ll use all the time if you know about it, but if you don’t it will come as a revelation! After you’ve made a selection either in your current document, or in a second document if you’re combining artwork, copy as usual by choosing Edit>Copy, or by using the shortcut keys Ctrl+C (Windows) or Cmd+C (Mac). Once you’re viewing the document you want to paste into, use the shortcut keys Ctrl+Shift+V (Windows) or Cmd+Shift+V(Mac).

03. Bird’s Eye View

If you’re doing detailed work such as cloning or edge refinement, it can be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Equally, if you’re working at a high zoom level, navigating around the document can become tiresome when you need to get back to your high-level zoom. With the Bird’s Eye View feature, when zoomed in you can press and hold the H key on your keyboard, and click and drag with your mouse to temporarily zoom out to a bird’s eye view. When you let go, you’ll zoom back in to the level you were working at.

04. Interactively set styles

When you’re adding a drop-shadow layer style, move the dialogue box to one side. By clicking and dragging on the canvas you can use your mouse to interactively move the shadow around relative to the layer casting the shadow.

05. Repeat Transformations

Once you’ve made a transformation to a layer or object using Edit>Transform, you can very quickly repeat that same transformation on another layer or object. Simply pressCmd+Shift+T on a Mac, or Ctrl+Shift+T on Windows, and Photoshop will repeat the same transformation on the currently active layer.

06. Solo your layer

If you’d like to preview a single layer, you can quickly get a look at it on its own by Alt+clicking on the layer’s eye icon in the layers panel. Alt+clicking on the eye icon again will return you to the previous layer visibility state. Note that if you accidentally click on another layer’s eye icon you’ll lose the ability to revert back to the previous state.

07. Enable visibility history

If you want to avoid the problem of losing layer visibility settings while previewing individual layers, you can tick a setting in the History Panel options dialogue box that will enable history state for layer visibility. Once checked, you can use Cmd/Ctrl+Alt+Z to step backwards through your history as you always have, but you’ll find changes to the visibility of layers is now included within that history.

08. Merge vector shapes

If you’re lucky enough to have Photoshop CS6 at your disposal, you can merge two vector shapes together and keep the result as an editable vector. Simply select the two shape layers and hitCmd/Ctrl+E on your keyboard to merge them together. In previous versions this would have resulted in a rasterized layer, but Adobe have updated the functionality for CS6.

• Also read: Make interesting vector shapes in Photoshop CS6

09. Quickly finish editing text

When you’re working with text boxes in Photoshop it can be frustrating to move between tools as your shortcut keys won’t work. A great little secret tip is that you can pressCmd+Return on your keyboard to finish editing text and move focus outside the text field. This allows you to quickly select other tools using their shortcut keys as appropriate (e.g.V for the move tool).

10. Organise your files properly

It’s easy to become sloppy with the way you name and organise files. But if you have to hand over your work to others, this can rebound on you, giving you a bad rep as people struggle to work out what’s going on. Follow our advice on how to organise your files properly here.

11. Draw dotted lines with the brush

A common Photoshop technique is to use the brush tool to draw straight lines. With the brush tool selected click to place a point, then hold down Shift+click at a second point to draw a straight line between the two points. You may not know that you can open the brush panel and set the brush spacing to 150%+ to draw a dotted line instead of a solid one!

12. Change brush size and hardness

It’s quite well known that you can use the square bracket keys [and ] to change the size of your brush inside Photoshop. What you may not know is that if you hold down the Shift key while tapping these same keys, you can also affect the hardness of the brush without having to visit the the brush panel!

13. Reset dialogue boxes

When you’re using a dialogue box with a pair of buttons that read OK/Apply and Cancel, it can be frustrating to undo changes you’ve made. Often you’ll want to hit Cancel and then re-open the dialogue. Many of these modal pop-ups allow you to hold down the Alt/Opt key on your keyboard to change the Cancel button to a Reset button, returning the settings to how they were when you opened the dialogue.

14. Scrub values

One of the best time-saving features in Photoshop is the ability to scrub your mouse over input values. If you want to change the opacity of a layer, for example, rather than click into the opacity field of the layers panel, click and drag on the value for opacity. A scrub to the left reduces the opacity, a scrub to the right increases it.

15. Copy layer styles quickly

If you’ve been using Photoshop for a while you’ll know you can copy a layer to a new layer by holding down Alt/Opt and dragging a copy of the artwork across the canvas. You can use this same trick for layer styles: simply hold down the Alt/Optkey and drag the FX icon in the layers panel from the layer with the styles to the target layer – the styles will be copied right over!

16. Open a document quickly

Rather than navigate to File>Open to open a document, double-click on the pasteboard inside Photoshop (the bit outside the main canvas) to automatically bring up the Open dialog box. Inside recent versions, this trick only works when you don’t have another document open.

17. Close documents quickly

You can also close your documents quickly. You’re probably familiar with the shortcut combination Ctrl+F4 (Windows) orCmd+W (Mac). This closes the current document, but if you add a second modifier key you can automatically close every document. Hold down Shift+Ctrl+F4 on a PC, orAlt+Cmd+W on a Mac to close all open documents. If you have multiple documents with changes you’d like to discard, check the Apply to All box when choosing Don’t Save to avoid having to confirm each document.

18. Share with friends and colleagues

One of the nicer features that arrived recently in Photoshop is the ability to share your screen with other users. Choose File > Share My Screen and log in with your Acrobat.comusername/password. Your web browser will open and a new online meeting will be set up automatically to which you can invite friends and colleagues. You’ll be able to chat, share webcam footage and your screen to make for productive collaboration – even if you’re the opposite side of the globe to your friends.

19. Quickly change measuring units

When you open a new document in Photoshop you can set the measuring units to match your needs, but sometimes you’ll need to switch between different units. The normal way to change is to select the options Photoshop>Preferences>Units & Rulers (or, on a PC, Edit>Preferences>Units & Rulers). But there is a quicker way! Just right-click on a ruler (Cmd+R/Ctrl+R will show your rulers if they’re not already visible) and choose the new measuring unit you need.

20. Fill with scripted patterns

Photoshop CS6 introduces a new pattern fill option based on a script. First isolate an object on a transparent background and define it as a pattern (Edit>Define Pattern). Next, access the fill command as you normally would (Edit>Fill or Shift+F5). Choose Pattern as the fill type, then select your isolated object from the patterns drop-down.

Finally, tick the Scripted Patterns checkbox and choose one of the options from the predefined scripts. All bar spiral will add a colour and brightness shift randomly to your object as part of the fill operation. You can also write your own scripts to use in this dialogue!

21. Insert Lorem Ipsum

A small new feature that will help save time when you’re producing mockups inside Photoshop is the handy new Lorem Ipsum function. Select the type tool and draw an area type box by clicking and dragging out a selection. Now choose Type > Paste Lorem Ipsum to automatically fill your type area with faux Latin text.

22. Use space to move selections

Once you’ve made a selection inside Photoshop using any of the standard tools, such as the marquee tools, you can easily move it around on your canvas. Simply hold down the space bar and use the selection tool you’ve got active to move the selection around.

23. History Snapshots

If you’re accustomed to using the history feature in Photoshop when you’ve made a mistake or want to back-track a few steps, this tip will allow you to take complete control of your artwork. Open the history panel, and click on the camera icon each time you reach a milestone in your artwork. This will create a history snapshot that you can return to at any point. Snapshots can also be used as the source for the history art brush!

24. Style text easily

If you’re lucky enough to be using Photoshop CS6, you can take advantage of a great new feature that makes it simple to achieve consistent text styling. The latest version of Photoshop introduces paragraph and character styles. Choose Window>Paragraph Styles to open the panel, then click on the new style icon to create a new style. Double-click on the style to set font, colour, leading, kerning, open type features and hyphenation options. To apply to text, simply highlight the text and click on the desired style.

25. Apply blending modes simultaneously

If you’re rocking CS6, a new feature that can save a bit of time is the ability to set blending modes for multiple layers simultaneously. You could always do this with opacity, but it’s only with CS6 and above you can select more than one layer (by holding down the Cmd/Ctrl key and clicking on each layer in turn inside the layers panel) and change the blending mode for all selected layers at the same time.

26. Crop non-destructively

Another nice addition to CS6 is the ability to crop without throwing away the bits of image outside your crop area. Choose the crop tool and uncheck the new Delete cropped pixels checkbox. Now when you apply your crop, the areas of image outside the crop will simply be hidden for later retrieval. To get access to the area outside your crop, simply choose the crop tool again and change your crop accordingly.

27. Hide other layers quickly

You can quickly get a preview of the current layer by turning off all other layers without losing track of which layers were visible and which were hidden. To do so, hold down the Alt/Opt key and click once on the eyeball icon in the layers panel for the layer you want to isolate. When you Alt/Opt and click again, the other layers will switch back on again, remembering which you had hidden.

28. Quickly create 3D extrusions

You can now add punch to your titles using 3D extrusions in Photoshop CS6. The 3D interface has been overhauled to make it more friendly to non-3D modellers, and it’s now really easy to create high-quality, textured 3D type by simply creating a type layer and choosing 3D>New 3D Extrusion from selected layer. Shadows and reflections are easier to control too, making it a great way to create engaging display type in a hurry.

29. Use actions for common tasks

One of the most powerful features in Photoshop is its ability to record macros of common tasks, allowing you to automate mundane manipulation work. Open the actions panel to see a list of pre-defined actions that can be run. Click the New button at the bottom of the panel to record your own action!

30. Add selective focus

With the new blur gallery in CS6 you can selectively blur and, by extension, add focus to your image. Individual focus points can be added to your image, with the amount of blur, fall off and iris size all edited directly on the canvas using the HUD. You can also add special effects such as lens bokeh with ease, making it simple to draw attention to the parts of an image you’re interested in.

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   Launch Photoshop. If you don’t currently own Photoshop, you can download a free trial version at Adobe.com. On the right side of the page, click on the Try Itbutton. You can get a 30-day, fully-functioning trial to see if Photoshop is right for you.

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   Open a document. Command-click (PC: Control-Click) here to open a sample picture in a new tab. You can use to follow along with this tutorial. Drag the photo to the desktop, then open up that image in Photoshop.

   • When you’re done, your screen should look something like this:
     
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   Select the Marquee tool (M). You can do this by clicking on the icon, or by typing the letter M. (For the remainder of this tutorial, the key shortcut will be shown after the tool name.) The Marquee tool is the most basic of all tools. It’s something you’re already familiar with: virtually every application and operating system selects things the same way: click and drag to select a region of the screen. Photoshop is no different.

   • Clicking and holding on the Marquee icon will give you a small popup menu where you can select the variations: Rectangular marquee (the default); Elliptical marquee, for selecting circles and ovals; and a single-pixel marquee for both horizontal and vertical.
   • For now, select the Rectangular marquee, place your cursor somewhere in the upper left of the image, then click and drag the mouse. You will see the selection expand, with the pixel values to the right of the selection. Drag towards the center, until the values are roughly W: 300 H: 200, then release the mouse button.
   • Click and hold in the middle of the selection, and move the cursor—notice how the selection moves with you. Drag the selection so that it surrounds the tan house on the hill, as shown:
     
   • From here, you can copy the selection, move it, apply filters to it—pretty much anything you can do in Photoshop starts with a selection.
     
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   Select the Lasso Tool (L). Closely related to the Marquee tool is the Lasso tool. Like the Marquee tool, the Lasso is used to make a selection. However, with the Lasso tool, you can make a freeform selections. Its variants include the Polygonal Lasso tool, and the Magnetic Lasso tool. Select the basic Lasso tool, and try it out.

   • Click and hold the mouse button, then draw a selection around the small white sail boat that’s left of center in the window. When you get to the bottom, release the mouse button—the selection will auto-complete. Now press Command-D (Control-D on a PC). This will deactivate the selection. Note that this works forall selections.
   • Press Shift-L. This will change the cursor to the Polygonal Lasso Tool. (Shift plus the tool shortcut will cycle through the other related tools). Notice the black arrow on the top left of the Polygonal Lasso cursor: that’s where the click point is.
   • Click once, anywhere on the image. Notice as you move your mouse, the starting point remains pinned, and a dashed line extends towards the cursor. Click again, and that next point becomes pinned. You can continue clicking until your selection is complete: as simple as a triangle, or as complex as you like. When you reach your last click point, double click instead of single click, and the polygon will automatically close.
     
   • Press the Escape key at any time to cancel the selection in progress.
   • Press Shift-L again. This selects the Magnetic Lasso. Like the lasso tools, the click point is the black pointer in the upper left of the cursor.
   • Try this: click and hold the mouse button with the cursor pointing at the water line of the bow (front) of the boat, and drag around the boat slowly. Notice as you drag, the selection actually snaps to the boat as you move!
   • At the top of the Photoshop window, you’ll see some tool modifiers: Feather, Anti-alias, Width, Contrast, and Frequency. As you advance, try each of these and see what effect they have on your selections. Hover over any interface element to see tool tips for that particular tool or setting.
     
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   Select the Quick Selection tool (W). This is the advanced version of the Magic Wand tool (which is still available as an alternate tool).

   • Try this: click and hold on the tan house in the middle of the picture. While holding the mouse, drag to the left or the right, “scrubbing” the house with the cursor. Notice how the selection grows as you do this. Make sure you select the roof, balcony, and all the rest of the house is selected. When done, you may notice that some of the shrubbery is selected, too:
     
   • There are two ways to eliminate the shrubbery with the Quick Selection tool. The first is to select the Subtract version of the tool.
     
   • The other way to subtract from the selection is to simply press and hold the Option (Alt) key, which temporarily switched the tool to the subtracting version (you can see the tool switch modifiers at the top of the screen as you do this.)
   • Either way, click and drag slightly on the offending shrubbery, and it will be deselected:
     
   • You can adjust the sensitivity of the selection by adjusting the size. The larger the size, the more will be selected. Try it out: click the standard Quick Selection tool, set the size to 100, then try selecting the house again.
     
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   Select the Crop Tool (C). According to Adobe, this is the most used tool in Photoshop. It’s one of the tools that absent anything else, can dramatically improve the composition of your photographs. When you select the Crop tool, you will notice small handles on the corners, and on the edges in the center of the image:

   • To crop an image, either drag the handles to surround the part of the image you wish to keep, or click and drag inside the image to draw the area to crop.However you do it, the result will be the area you’re keeping will be normal, and the area to be cut will be dimmed. Make a selection similar to this, then press Enter:
     
   • Notice how that’s changed the entire focus of the picture. Before you do anything else, click Undo (Command-Z, Mac, or Control-Z, PC) to restore the image to its original dimensions. If did make further changes, you can step back through your editing history using Command-Option-Z (Control-Alt-Z).
   • Perspective crop. Rather than just a plain rectangle crop, Perspective Crop lets you adjust the relative perspective of the image as you crop. While an interesting and powerful tool, well worth experimenting with, it’s a more advanced feature that will be covered in more advanced tutorials.
   • The Slice tools, also part of the Crop menu, are designed to carve up an image for placement into web pages. Like the Perspective crop, this is an advanced feature to be addressed in more suitable tutorials.
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   Select the Text Tool (T). They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a picture is not enough: you want words, too! Photoshop’s text tool gives you a few options.

   • With the Text tool selected, click near the bottom left of the picture. You’ll see a blinking text insertion cursor. Type “Boats in the Bay.” Depending on your settings, it might be too large, or too small, or a hard to read color. The editor for the text attributes is at the top of the Photoshop window:
     
   • Font family. This menu, like all font menus, lets you select the desired font. You can select from the list, or type in the font name. It will autofill as you type. For the purposes of this tutorial, select Helvetica.
   • Font style. If there are related font styles for the font family (e.g., Bold, Italic, Light, Medium, etc.), they will be available in this popup menu. If the menu is grayed, that means there are no variations on the current font family. For our purposes, select “Regular.”
   • Font size. This adjusts the size of the font. You have the option of entering in a specific font size, or choosing a size from a small list. For fast, flexible, and easy font size changes, click and hold on the T icon to the left of the field, and drag to the left or right: the size should change dramatically.
   • Antialiasing. This will determine the strength of the edge blending. “None” turns off antialiasing, and text is rendered like it was rendered in 1984: like blocky stair steps. Here’s a comparison of the different antialiasing settings:
     
   • Justification. The icons say it all: this justifies all text in the selected layer to the left, center, or right.
   • Color. This color chip defaults to the foreground color when you first choose the Text tool. To change the color, select the text layer itself, or with the Text cursor, any part of the text in a field. Click on the chip, select a color, and any selected text, plus all future text will be that new color. Note: If you select a text field with multiple colors, the color chip will display a question mark (?). All other text attributes will show as blanks.
   • Warp. This bends, or “warps” the text on the horizontal or vertical axis. To use it, simply select the text layer, click on the Warp button, and work the Style and sliders to find the right look . For this, we’ll use the Flag style, and set the bend to 100%.
     
   • Panels. The Panels button opens up two more palettes: Character and Paragraph. Use these to fine-tune the look of your text.
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   Create a sized text field. To do this, click and drag from the top left corner of where you want your text box to appear, to the bottom right corner of the box. You’ll see a rectangle on the screen, with handles on the corners and sides.

   • Type some a couple sentences into the box. Don’t worry if the text is too big or too small. When you’re done entering text, press the Enter key. If your text is too small, use the Font Size control (at the top) to make it larger. Conversely, if your text is too large, use the Font Size control to make the text smaller.
   • You can also adjust the size of the text field: hover over one of the handles for a couple seconds, and your cursor will change to a double arrow. Click and drag to resize the text box: the text will flow within the boundaries of the box.
     
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   Close the window. Save the file if you like, or discard changes. Either way, you can always get an untouched version here.

Method 2 of 4: Painting Tools

Method 3 of 4: Retouching Tools

Method 4 of 4: Advanced Tools

Key Term Test Friday 1/30

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Key Terms Test Tomorrow (Friday) 1/23

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  Play three games and take a practice test..send results in the comment section of this post.

With Man of Steel having been released this year and with fxphd’s new History of VFX course, we thought we’d go back in time and look at the pioneering visual effects technology used on the Christopher Reeve Superman films – the Zoptic front-projection system. We talk to the man behind the system, Zoran Perisic, who was a joint winner of an Academy Award for Superman’svisual effects in 1978 and the recipient of an Academy Scientific and Engineering Award and a Technical Achievement Award.

fxg: Let’s go back to the beginning – what led to you developing the first Zoptic system?

Perisic: We had a lot of challenges on Stanley Kubrick’s 2001- A Space Odyssey with spacecraft and rockets flying against star backgrounds; I felt that there had to be a more efficient way other than rotoscoping and hand painted mattes. Later, while working at Yorkshire TV in England, I was experimenting with slit-scan, using back-projected live action images instead of back-lit moiré patterns as we had done on 2001 – A Space Odyssey. The results were interesting but with limited practical use. I wondered if I could use a thin strip of front-projection material in place of a regular clear slit; I could change the shape of the slit for each frame and so animate the slit-scan distortion effect. This would require mounting a small projector in front of the camera on the slit-scan machine I had built (and installed in our spare bedroom much to the annoyance of my wife).

However if I were to front-project a single frame onto a slit as it “scanned” across the full image the result would be an exact copy of the projected image even if the camera/projector unit was tracking in towards it (the projected image gets smaller but so does the image area seen by the camera lens!).

Needless to say I abandoned that experiment but was intrigued by the idea. Then a thought struck me – what if I were to use the same camera-projector unit to track towards a regular front projection screen while front-projecting a full moving image at 24 fps? (Auto focus and projector iris compensation would, of course, be required but that was all do-able). The result would be a perfect one-to-one copy of the projected image but an object placed in front of the f.p. screen would appear to get nearer as the camera unit tracked towards it resulting in an apparent movement in depth. Bingo!

That in essence was the genesis of Zoptic front-projection system.

The next step was to make a compact camera/projector package that was manoeuvrable so that the “object” placed in front of the front-projection screen could be made to appear to move in any direction within the frame as well as towards or away from the camera while in fact it remained stationary.

Using synchronized zoom lenses on the projector and camera enabled the system to create much subtler and faster maneuvers…and then came a super hero character whose costume featured a blue suit and a red cape – the very colors that make it virtually impossible to derive a good travelling matte using the color difference process (commonly referred to as “blue or green screen” process.) Front-projection was the best option.

fxg: What were the challenges that front projection was perhaps not meeting before then?

Perisic: Front-projection was used at first as an alternative to back-projection for live action compositing because it was inherently more efficient. It used the same pin-registered projector with the addition of a beam-splitter mirror in front of the projection lens and a camera support (in much the same way as the first digital scanners consisted of a standard optical printer with a digital camera mounted in place of the film camera – a good example of evolution). Specially designed front-projection units came later equipped with nodal heads enabling the camera to pan and tilt across the composite image and even pan off the beam splitter onto an extended foreground set. It was still essentially a fixed set up just as back-projection but it required much less stage space.

I first came in contact with front-projection on 2001 – A Space Odyssey during the shooting of the ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence. The equipment was devised by Tommy Howard and used to project large format stills taken in Africa. It was an unwieldy, cumbersome contraption but the results were incredible. (The set was built on a rotating stage to facilitate changes of angle, with a large front-projection screen behind it.)

fxg: Can you talk about the camera, projector, lighting, lens, rigging equipment that made up Zoptic? How did this change over time?

Perisic: The bulk of a typical projector designed for back-projection, and later adapted for front projection, consisted of a massive lamp-house. Since the front-projection method required much less light the bulky lamp-house was replaced by a very much smaller unit.

There are two schools of thought on the best way to achieve the maximum brightness from a projector. One is to throw as much light into the film gate and hope that most of it goes through the film plate and is picked up by the lens and ends up as an image on the screen. The alternative approach is to trace the light path from the exit pupil of the lens back through the film gate and to the light source; then to design appropriate optics that will funnel the light bundle along the same optical path and into the lens. A specially designed light source allows for the light path to be bent and a dichroic filter inserted so that only the light in the visible spectrum is reflected towards the lens and the heat is filtered out.

Would you like to learn more about the history of visual effects and milestone films such as Superman? You can with the new fxphd course VFX102: History of Visual Effects, taught by Matt Leonard.

The projector shutter is dispensable for front-projection because the camera shutter blanks out the image in between frames anyway. (I also find that this helps with balancing the lighting of the foreground element to the background image.) On Superman The Movie the publicity department needed a still of Superman flying; a stills camera was mounted in place of the film camera and, with the projector running at speed, a burst of shots were taken without any attempts at synchronization. As a result some of the shots had a vertical smear in the background which added to the illusion of speed. One of those shots became the poster shot for Superman.

As a result a small tungsten halogen lamp can be used to produce a brighter image and of the same color temperature as the lamps used to light the set, which in turn makes it easier to achieve a good color balance between the projected image and foreground element. It also made it possible to use a camera lens on the projector without the risk of damage. However projecting through a camera zoom lens with an anamorphic rear unit is a touch more difficult.

On the original Superman we used Cooke 5:1 zooms with Technovision anamorphics both on the projector and on the camera. On Superman II we used the newly developed f2.8 Cooke Super Cine Varotal 10:1 zoom (25-250mm) on the camera and the 8-perf Vista Vision format on the projector (Super Cine Varotal could be configured for 35mm or VV format). On some of the scenes we used VistaVision to VistaVision in order to generate a composite plate and then used that plate to composite another element as VV to 35mm anamorphic. (e.g. aerial fight scenes and chases through Metropolis.)

Another addition on Superman II was the Zoptic Flying Rig which was suspended from the ceiling and had a 360 degrees rotation in addition to pan and tilt and could be operated manually or remotely. (We also had a motion control computer control unit that could record and playback the Flying Rig moves but soon discovered its limitations for most live action shots). I designed this rig and had it built during the hiatus between the end of production on Superman and the “resumption” of shooting on Superman II (The major portion of Superman II had already been shot by Richard Donner back-to-back with the first movie except for visual effects).

Superman II had the most challenging flying effects of all 3 movies that I was involved with and also achieved the highest quality both in terms of image quality and flight agility.
For reasons known only to the production managers of this world Superman III was shot with 35mm on both projector and camera using Cooke Super Cine Varotal 10:1 zooms and the Flying Rig. I was acting only as a consultant on that one and had, by then, set up base at Paramount Studios in Hollywood with my second complete Zoptic Flying Rig.

fxg: Can you take us through a typical Zoptic shot from say Superman or Superman II – such as a scene of Superman flying past Metropolis buildings?

Perisic: Non chasing Superman down the street at night was one of those shots that required Vista-Vision to Vista-Vision compositing and then Vista-Vision to 35mm anamorphic. Because helicopters were not allowed, the background plates were shot from the back of a camera car. As Superman and Non were flying just above the street lights it was difficult to keep them in the clear area between the light flares in order to maintain the illusion that they were above and behind the lights.

I got an artist to rotoscope the lights in the original background plate and produce a hi-contrast plate which had only clear circles on a black background. A sync mark was made in the camera gate before each take and at the end of the take the film was rewound in the camera; the hi-contrast plate was loaded in the projector and projected on a clear area of the f.p. screen as a superimposition. A diffusion filter in front of the camera lens made the white blobs of the hi-contrast plate flare out to match the flares of the street lights. This of course could have been done later on an optical printer but that would have involved going through another generation.

Another example of this double-plate technique is Superman kicking Non. Superman flies in towards the camera from top left of frame, somersaults backwards and kicks Non who has flown into the frame from the right. A pole arm was placed through the front projection screen; at the end of the pole arm is a body mold attached by means of a mechanical joint allowing for a pitch and yaw movement. For this shot Chris was lying on his back with his costume covering the body mold which was yawed to a ¾ forward position. At the start of the shot the Zoptic Flying Rig is rotated 180 degrees so that the camera is effectively upside-down – this makes Superman look the right way up – and as the Zoptic unit rotated to normal position the body mold was yawed through 90 degrees so that the feet were pointing towards the camera at the completion of the roll.

On the day we did this shot we had rehearsed the move with Chris’s double and waited for him to be released from the main unit (something we had to do a lot of in general as Chris did not like to be doubled). When he came on the flying unit stage I showed him the video assist recording of the rehearsal and started to explain the process. Usually he would want to know every detail of the process but on this occasion he just shook his head saying: “Whoa! That’s way too complicated. Just shout when you want me to do the kick.”

Probably the most difficult shot involved five people in the air – when the 3 bad guys fly to the North Pole taking Lois Lane and Lex Luthor with them.  It involved the use of 3 pole arms on a 90 foot wide curved screen. The pole arms were rotated clockwise and anticlockwise in unison – the Zoptic Flying Rig was also rotated in the same direction cancelling out the apparent rotation effect of the pole arms and so maintaining the appearance of a straight and level flight. As a result the flyers appear to move up and down relative to each other although they are attached to fixed poles.

fxg: What are some of the other camera, effects and other projects you have continued to work on and be involved with?

Perisic: I designed the Moving Stills Front-Projection unit which utilizes a large format still of the background image while only a relatively small area of that image is seen (projected) by the projection lens. The compound carrying the transparency (background image) is moved independently of the projection lens and linked to the gearhead supporting the unit so that when the camera pans and tilts across the f.p. screen, the appropriate area of the transparency is projected by an instant motion control unit. This unit was used on Sylvester Stallone’s Cliffhanger as well as on Gunbus/Sky Bandits and The Phoenix and the Magic Carpet.

I also developed Zoptic Blue/Green Screen front projection unit which allows for a narrow band of a specific color (Blue, Green etc.) to be projected so that a clean, uncontaminated color separation matte of the subject could be extracted. It was used on Batman Returns where Batman and Catwoman’s shiny black costumes presented a particular problem with Blue Screen wrap-around contamination.

And, of course, Z3D. A single camera, single lens, format independent, 3D system for use with both film and digital cameras with an easy to use convergence control and an optical or electronic 3D viewfinder. It can also be used for Front-Projection 3D!

fxg: What are your thoughts on the move from optical to digital effects?

Perisic: I look upon this as Evolution rather than Revolution and can see a real danger of “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” if one takes the “revolutionary” approach. It has made the optical printer obsolete but has given rise to the film scanner, digital Inter-negative etc. Green has largely taken precedence over the Blue for screen backing particularly with digital cameras…but it is still the same color separation process that enables the creation of a live action matte, regardless of how the elements are composited.

Well-made and well executed shots using models and miniatures are generally more convincing that the CG shots that look like CG shots. There seems to be a temptation to use CGI animation in live action scenes when it is not necessarily the best solution to a specific FX requirement. Like with any other VFX technique it might be good to remember that “just because one can do it – does not mean that one should do it.”

Front-projection has always been more of a niche technique unlike back-projection and blue screen color separation which were more widely used. The reason, I suspect, is that front-projection requires somewhat more sophisticated equipment in terms of optics and is in limited supply as these units are not mass produced. There is also a tendency to go for the color separation solution because the shots can then be farmed out to various VFX houses for digital compositing. Often the green/ or blue screen elements end up being shot before the backgrounds, which is a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

The use of digital cameras does not automatically preclude front-projection. The moving stills front-projection works perfectly well with any digital camera as there is no need for synchronization – but there is a need for the background plate to be shot first!

Standard front projection requires synchronization between the projector and camera, but this too is no longer limited to film cameras only. In fact projecting a film plate and photographing the composite image with a digital camera offers some interesting advantages in terms of resolution and color balance between the projected background and the foreground. The projected plate can also be originated on a digital camera or as a CG element and printed out to film for front-projection compositing. (We did a 7-Up commercial many years ago, when CGI was in its infancy, by compositing live action with CG animated background which had been printed out to film.)

However using a digital projector in place of a film projector for front-projection would require finding solutions to some major problems in connection with the projection lens and the lamp-house.

There are still only two ways of generating mattes for compositing of live action elements, (apart from “in camera” solutions such as mirror shots, split screens, rotoscoping and wire removal) :

a) Color separation (green screen, blue screen etc.)
b) Process-projection (back-projection, front-projection)
In terms of lighting the front-projection is more suitable for back-lit and cross-lit scenes whereas color separation approach is more suitable for flat, front-lit scenes. Interactive lighting is extremely important in compositing; it enables the DP to blend the foreground and background elements into one coherent image instead of two or more elements spliced together. With front-projection the DP has a complete control of the final image – what you see is what you get.

fxg: Can you give your impressions on say Man of Steel and its visual effects?

Perisic: Wall-to-wall CGI must have provided a lot of work. With the new costume for Superman it should have been easier to derive good color separation mattes and produce some effective flying shots. But, alas, the flying is reduced to a few “hovering” shots (wire removal) and a lot of zapping streaks accompanied by very loud bangs.

As for 3D – it was a missed opportunity. The 2D to 3D conversion can only produce a “pseudo” 3D at best with a limited depth illusion behind the screen, but at least it offers an opportunity for some of the CG elements to be re-rendered with a second viewpoint to create at least a few shots that have real depth and can on occasions come forward from the screen plane.

To think that here was a unique opportunity to have Superman fly through the screen and right over the heads of the audience! Such a shot would not need to be accompanied by a loud bang – but it would need to be shot in 3D!