I recently started the trial for Viewpoint and am very impressed with speed and ease of use. However there is one critical thing I may be missing. I often need to match things to another image layer (like backgrounds to buildings or people) and have always used PShop’s transform tools for that. Viewpoint would be the perfect tool for its precise control while transforming, but I can not see a way to have a reference layer on top to adjust a photo to it. Is this even possible?
Welcome to the USER forum.
For automated corrections (distortions, etc.), VP must “see” the associated original image (which must then be supported → camera, lens). For other manual perspective adjustments, use the VP standalone version.
Since I’m using an old PS version… Does your PS support VP as a plugin?
If not, I highly doubt what you’re looking for.
Hi Wolfgang,
Thanks for your reply. I am using latest PS.
Maybe I was not clear in what I need. I mostly need to manually correct an underlying photo to match a foreground masked render of a 3D model. This needs to be pixelperfect, so precision is very important. My request is, if it is possible to have the alpha masked 3D model (which is in a seperate layer in PShop) visible in VP, so I can “distort” the photo to match the masked render. This doesn’t need to be directly in the plugin: it also would be OK if it is possible in the standalone app or in combination with Photolab.
In order to work on an “alpha mask” you need to be able to export and re-import it, but I highly doubt that’s possible.
What you could experiment with… Hide all layers except the one you want to change, export it as a new file (with the same size/resolution of course), adjust it in VP Standalone, keeping the outer border, and “import” it into PS again on top of your background layer. Note that I’ve never tried this – but it might give you some new insight … 
I’m not familiar with Viewpoint, but I checked the online manual, would the Guide Tool be of use here?
I was thinking you could load your reference image and then add some guidelines to mark critical points and then copy those guidelines to the image you want to adjust…
I found the Guide Tool in the user guide Interface – ViewPoint Guidelines
Thanks for all the suggestions. As I understand now it is not possible to load in an extra masked layer to use as reference. Using guides is not an option because it does not help me with pixelperfect compositions. Parts of the photo need to be distorted to perfectly fit the masked layer. For now the tools in PShop are the fastest and easiest way to do this. Hopefully an extra reference layer can be added sometime in the future.
It might be worth submitting a Feature Request, they have layers in other DXO tools so adding the function to ViewPoint may not be that hard, the ability to add a reference layer and change the opacity of an adjustment layer to 50% would allow the user to align very precisely.