How to Straighten Crooked Photos
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
The Measure Tool is the best way to straighten images in Photoshop, taking all the guess work out of it. As I will show you in a moment, Photoshop will do most of the work for you as long as there’s something in the image that should be straight! By default the Measure Tool is buried behind the Eyedropper Tool in the Tools palette, so in order to select it, you need to click and hold your mouse button down on the Eyedropper Tool for a second or two. A fly-out menu appears showing you the other tools buried behind it. Select the Measure Tool by clicking on it.
You first want to look for something in your image that needs to be straight, either horizontally or vertically. Next, you want to drag along its edge with the Measure Tool so Photoshop has something to work with when trying to calculate how warped the photo actually is. In this instance, I will click and drag horizontally along the roof of the building behind Ms. Liberty. Clearly the roof should be completely level, yet it obviously isn’t at the moment. I can simply click once on the left side of the roof and, holding my mouse button down, drag over to the right side of the roof. Photoshop uses the angle of the line we just created to figure out how far the image needs to be rotated in order to straighten it.
Click and drag with the Measure Tool along the edge of something in the photo that should be straight horizontally or vertically. If you look up in the Options Bar at the top of the screen, you can see the angle of the line you’ve just drawn (it’s the number listed to the right of the letter “A”). In my case, we can see that my line is on an angle of 1.9 degrees:
The Options Bar showing the angle of the line drawn with the Measure Tool. Photoshop will use this angle to figure out how far it needs to rotate the image in order to straighten it. Choose The “Rotate Canvas - Arbitrary” Command Click on the Image menu at the top of the screen, choose Rotate Canvas, and then choose Arbitrary:
Go to Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary. I have to laugh every time I do this because the word “arbitrary” actually means “random or by chance”, yet that’s exactly the opposite of what we’re doing here. We’re not randomly rotating our image or leaving anything to chance. We’ve used the Measure Tool to find out exactly how much of an angle our image needs to be rotated by, and now Photoshop can use the information we’ve given it to straighten our image without any guess work. As I’ve said before, much of the problem with learning Photoshop comes from getting around the terminology, and in this case, I don’t know what Adobe was thinking.
However, life goes on. Once you click on “Arbitrary”, Photoshop pops up the Rotate Canvas dialog box, and as you can see, the work has already been done for you. In this case, Photoshop has entered a value of 1.85 for the Angle option, and it even recognized that the image needs to be rotated counter-clockwise, which is why the CCW option is also selected:
Photoshop Tutorials: The “Rotate Canvas” dialog box with the angle and direction already selected for us. You may be wondering why Photoshop entered an angle of 1.85 when the Options Bar showed an angle of 1.9 a moment ago. The reason is because Photoshop rounds off the angles in the Options Bar to 1 decimal place, so it showed 1.9 even though the angle of the line we drew with the Measure Tool was actually 1.85. The angle shown in the Rotate Canvas dialog box is the correct angle.
At this point, all we need to do is click OK in the Rotate Canvas dialog box to exit out of it and have Photoshop rotate and straighten our image for us. The image has now been rotated and straightened. Everything looks good, and the Statue of Liberty is no longer leaning to the right. We were able to straighten the image perfectly without any guess work thanks to the Measure Tool and the Rotate Canvas command.
Of course, there is a small problem. By rotating the image inside the document window, we’ve added some white canvas areas around the outside of the photo. We’ll need to finish things off by cropping away those areas, and for that, we can use Photoshop’s Crop Tool. Select the Crop Tool from the Tools palette, or simply press the letter C on your keyboard to select it with the shortcut:
Using the Crop Tool click near the top left corner of your image and drag down towards the bottom right to create a border around the area of the image you want to keep. You can fine-tune your selection by dragging any of corner handles or by dragging the top, bottom, left or right sides of the selection:
You can use the Crop Tool to drag a selection area around the portion of the image you want to retain. Once you’ve dragged out your cropping border, press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to have Photoshop crop the image.
Tags: Hobbies
Popularity: 16% [?]
Sphere: Related Content