Photoshop users have long requested support for angled guides. (But hey, 26 years in, what’s the rush, amirite?) I’d always ask why people wanted these, and a lot of the time it was to aid with drawing in perspective. Rather than simply let traditional PS guides be rotated, I proposed the following:
- Leverage the overlay that lets PS display a 3D navigation widget. Assuming you’ve never used it, here’s a screenshot. The overlay can be moved independent of the canvas.
- Allow users to transform 2D and 3D objects to use as stencils—e.g. moving, scaling, and rotating parallel lines (which could be made to converge), French curves, etc.
- Make drawing tools snap to these shapes, allowing them to be used for tracing.
- Alternately let them be used as stencils, letting you draw inside or outside them.
Obviously all this can be filed in the Tolstoy-length volume Sh*t I Never Got Implemented In Photoshop, but whatevs.
It all came back to mind when seeing Mopholio’s Stencil, “a new customizable tool for digital drawing, which works as a tool inside the popular Trace App.” Check it out:
