How to Use the TRANSFORM TOOL to Replace a Blank Screen

Using the Transform Tool in Photoshop

This quick tutorial is all about how to use the Transform Tool in Photoshop. Let’s say your building just completed construction, awesome! Time to go take some photos.

You open the front doors and walk inside and everything is new and crisp. There’s a fresh coat of paint, the floors are clean, and all the furniture is in it’s place. Perfect time to snap those photos.

You spend some time there taking dozens of photos and you’re happy with the result. Now you’re back in the office and starting to scroll through the images and pick out the best ones for the website.

Everything looks great, but you notice a TV over the fireplace and it just looks like a black hole. No image on it and it’s just there, taking up wall real estate. Not looking great.

Well, at least there’s an easy way to fix that. All you need to know how to use is the TRANSFORM TOOL to replace a blank screen in Photoshop.

There’s a few quick steps to this, let me show you how.

Here’s the agenda:

Find a Background Image

The first thing you want to do is find a background image for your TV.

I like to use Pexels.com. They have a ton of free images you can download.

Feel free to search and scroll around until you find something you like. I just found a soothing mountain landscape photo.

Then, click and download the image. Save it somewhere you’ll remember, because we’ll be opening it up in just a second.

Insert the Image into Your Photoshop File

Now that you have a file saved, it’s time to open it up in Photoshop.

Once you’ve done that, we’ll simply drag and drop the image into the Photoshop file you want to edit.

Take a look at the quick video below.

Size Your Image

Next step is to size the background image.

It doesn’t have to be real precise because we’ll be modifying it further in just a second. But this will make things a little easier for you.

You can either go up to the top and click on ‘Show Transform Controls‘ or you can use CTRL+T on your keyboard to bring up those controls.

Then click on one of the white nodes and hold Shift while clicking and dragging to modify the image size.

Change the Opacity of the Background Image

Next step is to change the opacity of the background image.

This is just so that you can see the TV screen frame behind your background image.

I usually choose about 30% for the opacity, but it doesn’t matter. As long as you can see through the image, that’s all you’re really going for.

Transform Image

Here’s where we will use the Transform Tool to modify the image so it looks like it’s inside the TV screen.

The most important thing here is to match the perspective. We can’t just make it smaller and delete out whatever falls outside of the TV screen. It’ll look super weird.

So to do that we’ll bring up the transform controls again, if they aren’t already there.

Then, CTRL + Click on the white nodes in the corner and line it up with the inside of the TV frame.

Do this for all the corners and your background image will match the perspective of the TV!

Change Blending Mode of Layer to 'Screen'

It’s looking pretty good! But if you notice from our original photo, there’s some reflections on the TV screen from the lights. Those reflections wouldn’t completely disappear just because there’s an image on the TV.

So we’re going to change the blending mode of the layer so that we can see some of those reflections and it will really make sure the image looks like it was originally on the TV screen.

All we’re going to do for this is change the opacity back to 100%. Then change the Blending Mode from ‘Normal’ to ‘Screen’.

And that’s it! Your TV screen is no longer a black hole.

Thanks for checking out my post: How to use the TRANSFORM TOOL to Replace a Blank Screen | Photoshop. I hope you were able to find some value! As always, let me know if you have any questions or suggestions below!

See ya next time!

Craig
The Archi-Tech Guy

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How to Use the TRANSFORM TOOL to Replace a Blank Screen | Photoshop