Vanishing Point is an essential tool for anyone that’s trying to clone, paint, copy or paste in perspective in Photoshop. Here are my favorite shortcuts that make using Vanishing point much easier.
• Use the Create Plane tool in Vanishing Point to create a perspective grid. While creating the perspective grid, holding down the X key and clicking in the image temporarily zooms the clicked location to 2x.
• Command (Mac) / Control (Win) -drag the middle anchor point of a plane to create a perpendicular plane.
• Option (Mac) / Alt (Win) -drag the middle anchor of a plane to change the angle of a plane to its parent.
• Command (Mac) / Control (Win) with a plane selected, selects the plane underneath it.
• Command + Z (Mac) | Control + Z (Win) will Undo (add the Shift key to Redo).
• With the Brush selected, [ or ] will decrease/increase brush size (add the Shift key to decrease/increase brush hardness).
• Command + 0 (Mac) | Control + 0 (Win) + 0 or double-click the Zoom tool to Fit in View.
• Double-click the Zoom tool to zoom to center at 100%.
• If you copy something to the clipboard before selecting Vanishing Point, Command + V (Mac) | Control + V will paste information that’s on the clipboard into vanishing point. Note: If you want to place what you past on it’s own layer, be sure to create that blank layer in the Layers panel before selecting Vanishing Point.
• Command + D (Mac) | + D Control (Win) deselects the marquee selection.
• Command + H (Mac) | Control + H (Win) hides selection and surfaces.
• Hold the Shift key to constrain a tool (such as the brush) on and across multiple surfaces.
• Command + Shift + T (Mac) | Control + Shift + T (Win) repeats the last duplicate and move operation.
• With the Marquee tool selected:
Use the left, right, up, down arrow keys to nudge the marquee selection 1 pixel at a time (add the Shift key to move 10 pixels).
Double click to expand the marquee to fill the editing plane.
Option -drag (Mac) | Alt -drag (Win) a selection to create a floating selection.
Tap the Backspace or Delete key to delete a floating selection.
Option -drag (Mac) | Alt -drag (Win) outside of a floating selection to rotate the selection.
There are additional options within Vanishing Point such as Render Measurements to Photoshop, Return a 3D layer to Photoshop, and Exporting the grid to DXF (accessed using the small drop down menu next to the Edit Plane tool). Plus:
• Command (Mac) / Control (Win) + E will export to a DFX file.
• Command (Mac) / Control (Win) + Shift +E will export to a 3DS file.
• Command (Mac) / Control (Win) + Shift + H to hide measurements.
