Straightening a Crooked Image
Try as we might to keep our pictures (and lives) in balance,
the forces of nature, fatigue, and skewed perspective occasion-
ally conspire to create an image that’s tilted at an undesirable
angle. Straightening an image used to be one of the ultimate
Photoshop secret handshakes, something you never could have
figured out on your own without special initiation. But Pho-
toshop CS5 makes it easier than ever to correct this common
composition problem.
In the past, when you wanted to realign your image with the
horizon or some other dependable touchstone of perspective,
you actually had to use a command called Arbitrary. But arbi-
trary was Photoshop-code for highly specific. There you were,
filled with the simple desire to set the world to rights, and it
always seemed like the most arbitrary things about the act of
straightening were the insulting name and the complexity of
the tool you were required to use. At last, in Photoshop CS5,
we’re given a much more straightforward (and sensibly named)
tool. In this exercise, we’ll employ this gift from Adobe engi-
neers to straighten out the horizon in an image of a notoriously
askew landmark.- Open a crooked photograph. Open the file
named Crooked Pisa.jpg, located in the Lesson
02 folder inside Lesson Files-PsCS5 1on1. This
image, shown in Figure 2-5, comes from Fotolia photogra-
pher Soul Catcher. Like many photos of this famous tower,
the leaning nature of the building seems to wreak havoc
with the photographer’s sense of the horizon. Our job is
to straighten the earth, so that the tower’s angle is shown
accurately but the tourists who have traveled to Pisa to see
it don’t have to compromise their posture in the process.
And isn’t a leaning tower much more interesting if every-
thing else is actually upright? - Select the ruler tool in the toolbox. Click and hold the
eyedropper icon near the top of the toolbox and choose
the ruler tool from the flyout menu (see Figure 2-6). This
tool lets you measure the distance and angle between two
points. But even more importantly for our current purposes,
it gives you access to a new feature in Photoshop CS5, the
Straighten button, which appears in the options bar when
you evoke the ruler tool.
Figure 2-5.
Figure 2-6.42