338
Flipping makes sense
W
E’VE LOOKED IN THIS CHAPTER
at ways of opening doors, drawers
and other objects. Sometimes, though, we find
the technique just looks wrong – and it can be
hard to put our finger on exactly why.
In this example, we’ll open the left-hand
door of this bookcase cupboard. Unusually,
we’ll make it open inwards rather than
outwards, to demonstrate the technique more
clearly: if the logic of the situation baffles you,
then you might imagine that the cupboard is a
secret portal to a distant fantasy land (or just
that the carpenter fitted the door the wrong
way around).
1
Start by selecting the door and copying it to a new layer,
exactly as we did earlier in this chapter; make a new door-
shaped layer beneath it, filled with black, to represent the
interior of the cupboard. Then distort the door in perspective.
What’s gone wrong? Why doesn’t it work?
4
We need to bring that doorknob back, of course, which
means copying it from the original door, pasting it on
top, and then flipping it horizontally. But now the shadow will
be on the wrong side of it: so erase the shadow, and paste it
again behind the knob so it faces the right way.
12
The third dimension
339
HOT TIP
This technique
can be applied to
all sorts of cases
where we need
to flip an object
horizontally.
Remember that
three-dimensional
surfaces look
different when
viewed from
different angles!
2
Apart from the obvious issue with the door handle, the
problem is the molding. In the original, we could see the
left edge of the molding clearly, but the right edge was facing
away from us. Now, the opposite is true. So select just the
molding, flip it horizontally and distort it to fit the shape.
5
To accentuate the sense of the door disappearing into
the gloom, we need to bring just a little of that gloom
forwards. The easiest way to do this is to make a new layer,
using the door as a Clipping Mask, and paint in black on here
with a very large brush at a very low opacity.
3
We can blend the molding into the door by making a
Layer Mask for it, and painting with a small brush to
create a soft transition at the edges. Then, on a new layer, we
can use the Clone tool to remove the original doorknob, both
the flipped and the flipped-again versions.
6
Finally, don’t forget those touches of detail. Because
the door opens inwards, we need to be able to see the
thickness of it in the edge facing us. Create this on a new layer
in front of the door, painting out the top and bottom in black
so there’s a tiny gap parallel to the front edge.
How to Cheat in Photoshop CC
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