Remodeling with Photoshop

Recently a prospective client saw a portico that I had built for a neighbor and asked if I could do something similar for his house. One of my first steps in making a proposal is to put together a mock-up of the design. Using Photoshop, I superimposed the existing portico onto the front door area of their house.

The picture below shows the client's house with the existing landing, steps and railing. The photo to the right is of the neighbor's portico. The second row shows options for a tall and medium sized portico. I think the shorter version fits this house.

Here's how I superimposed the portico on the house:
(1) I start with monochrome (black and white) photos so that I don't have to try to match colors, just the contrast and brightness. In Photoshop, change color to monochrome by going to image/mode/grayscale.  Then I set the resolution for both photos the same. 

(2) I cropped and copied the portico roof from the photo of the neighbor's house. The rectangular marquee is a good selection tool for rectangular areas, but for the angled roof slope I used the polygonal lasso tool. Since the photo is taken from the opposite angle, I reversed the image horizontally by going to image/rotate canvass/flip canvass horizontally, drug it to the client's front porch, then re-sized the pasted image using trial and error until the front door was the same size in both photos.  The roof's shadow on the side wall of the house over the door was a fortunate accident from pasting.

(3) The horizontal view angle perspective is also a little different in the two original pictures, so I used the "Skew" function in Photoshop. First I increased the size of the canvas for the portico shot so that I would have room to work. Then I pulled the corners so that the deck lines were at the same angle, giving the two sets of stairs the same perspective. It took a few tries but eventually I had a fairly close match. Each attempt required going to "edit / step back" so that only the correct image would be pasted in permanently.

To finish, I used the rectangular selection tool, copied parts of the posts and pasted them in, then used the paint brush and line functions to finish. It wasn't necessary to make a perfect photo, but starting with a basic visual model of how the finished product will look helps both the client and the designer.

View a previous article about using Photoshop with cabinetry images.