Recently I wanted to programmatically distort an image into an isosceles trapezoid using JavaScript to get a simple 3D perspective effect. This might seem like a simple task but when you only have 2D rotate and skew transforms, there isn’t a straightforward way to make such a transform.

One option might be to use the 3D transforms of WebGL in a browser, but that’s a really heavy solution and there currently aren’t any WebGL canvas libraries for Node.JS. It would be better if we could use just a 2D canvas drawing context.

So how can we accomplish this without 3D transforms? Read on to find out!