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Straightening Horizons and Converging Verticals - Part 1

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As any regular visitors to the members' photo gallery will tell you, one of my pet hates is tilting horizons. Although it is easily done in the heat of the moment when you are taking a photo, there is no excuse for not straightening the picture at the editing stage as it is very easy to do.

In the photo above you can see that I was so engrossed with getting the ape right I missed the sloping horizon.

All that needs to be done is select the crop tool from the toolbox and draw a thin rectangle over the horizon.

If you move the cursor outside the selection marquee and put it near a corner, you will see that the cursor changes to a double ended arrow bent round a corner. When you click and drag with this cursor the rectangle will rotate about the center. By rotating the selection and moving it, which you can do by clicking and dragging anywhere inside the marquee, you can line it up over the horizon as you can see above.
Being careful not to change the rotation, extend the sides of the selection to cover the area you want to keep. Press enter and your picture will be cropped and straightened. Doing it this way means that you do lose a bit of the picture, which is usually not a bad thing. In part two there is a different technique which you can use to straighten a picture while only losing a minimal amount.

Of course you can straighten anything using this technique not just horizons. Here's another series showing how to straighten up this still life. The same principle applies as above, get as close as you can to the uprights that you want to line up to. You can see in the second picture that the bottle is actually wider at the top than it is at the bottom, this is a perspective effect caused by pointing the camera slightly downwards, the opposite happens when you point the camera upwards as you will see in part two.

Also in the second part of this tutorial you will see how you can straighten the uprights if you want to, but in this instance I don't really think it would be a good idea. So here, instead of lining up exactly to one side of the bottle, we take an average line between the two converging sides.
If you're not sure if your horizon or upright is straight or not, you can always check you can always check by dragging a guide from the ruler at the top or side of the picture. See how on the next page.
<-previous page | 1 | 2 | next page->

Photoshop Tutorial Description Level
Size Scaling your files.
Contrast Balancing those pixels.
Colour Dealing with colour casts.
Levels A short video showing how to use the levels adjustment to control contrast.
Processing RAW Files An introduction to Adobe Camera Raw.
Processing RAW Files using HSL Advanced use of ACR.
Sharpening Using the unsharp mask.
Using the Quick Mask Masking parts of your picture to edit certain areas.
Adjustment Layer Masks How to build accurate layer masks.
Straightening Horizons A must for landscape and building photographers.
Replacing Boring Skies Using layers in Photoshop.
Videos on Compositing Video tutorials on using layers.
Using the Channel Mixer How to make a better job of changing images from colour to black & white.
Using Curves on Adjustment Layers laying with contrast and tones to give a more dramatic effect.
High Dynamic Range How to shoot and process HDR pictures with Photomatix Pro software.
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