4 ways to straighten a crooked photo
Saturday 9 February 2019, 13:26 by Michelle Peeters | 24,066 views | 5 commentsThis article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.
There is nothing more irritating in a photo than a crooked horizon or a sea that appears to be 'draining away'. Yet it happens to every photographer now and then. Either by accident or because it can sometimes be difficult to get a straight line, such as the horizon or the sea, perpendicular to the photo. Fortunately, this is easy to fix in post-processing!
There are three ways to straighten a crooked photo with Photoshop, and it is also very easy in Lightroom.
1. Ruler tool
Open the photo you want to straighten. Select the Ruler tool from the toolbar. It looks like a small ruler and is hidden behind the Eyedropper tool. Click the arrow and you will see the other available tools.
Find a point with a straight line in the photo, in this case the sea horizon. Drag in a horizontal line from left to right along this edge. As soon as you start dragging, the angle of the line appears both in the options bar and in the Info panel. Open this panel via the Window menu if necessary.
But you can ignore both, as Photoshop keeps track of the angle and places that information where you need it in the next step.
In the Image menu, under Image Rotation, choose Arbitrary. The Rotate Canvas dialogue box appears. Photoshop has already entered the correct rotation angle to straighten the image for you, based on your measurement. It has even determined whether the image should be rotated clockwise or anti-clockwise.
Now all you have to do is click OK and your photo will be perfectly straight. Now that it is straight, you will probably want to crop it to remove the white edges that have appeared at the sides. Press C to select the Crop tool, drag a frame and press Return (PC: Enter).
2. Camera Raw
The second method is to have Camera Raw straighten the image automatically. Click the Transform icon at the top of the toolbar, it is the eighth icon from the left. Under Upright, click the Level icon, it is the third from the left.
3. Manually
As a third and final method, you can simply do it yourself by rotating the photo until it is straight. Click the Crop tool (C) in the toolbar, move the cursor outside the crop frame and click and drag in the desired direction.
Stop dragging when the image looks straight and press the Return key (PC: Enter) to apply your crop. If you want to keep the proportions, often 2:3 or 3:2, during cropping, you can enter them in the top left.
4. With Lightroom
In Lightroom, it works almost exactly the same way as in Photoshop. Go to Crop in the right-hand panel and choose the Straighten tool. Here, too, you can choose 2 x 3 / 4 x 6 under Aspect Ratio to keep these proportions.
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About the author
Michelle Peeters is fotografe en oprichter van DeuxBleus Fotografie. Michelle herkent het bijzondere in het gewone en het gewone in het bijzondere. Ze heeft zich nooit willen specialiseren en is daardoor van alle markten thuis.
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5 comments
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jaak huyghe wrote on Tuesday 12 February 2019 at 10:47 | replywhy (extensive) screenshots everywhere, but NOT in Camera Raw?
Translated from Dutch. -
Ron Westra wrote on Tuesday 12 February 2019 at 17:10 | replyCan you also edit photos in Snapcheet
Translated from Dutch. -
Evert Mulder wrote on Tuesday 12 February 2019 at 20:09 | replyThis can also be done in Lightroom in the Lens Corrections panel with the rotate option.
Translated from Dutch.
There are more correction options there. -
Michelle Peeters wrote on Wednesday 13 February 2019 at 10:52
| reply
@Ron: yes, you can also rotate in Snapseed. The only thing is that the rotate button is not used to rotate the photo itself, but to switch the crop tool from Horizontal to Vertical or vice versa. You can also rotate the photo itself in Snapseed, but you need a separate tool for that: Rotate (Draaien) or Transform (Transformeren). The latter also offers perspective correction in addition to a rotation option, useful for correcting buildings that are falling backwards.
Translated from Dutch.
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