Using the Crop &
Straighten Tool
Even the most careful photographer will sometimes rush a shot and
take a photo that’s not quite level, with either a sloping horizon or a
leaning building. Fortunately, Lightroom offers several effortless ways
to correct those faults.
1
The main tools that you’ll need to straighten your shots
are found in the Crop & Straighten tool, located on the
editing tools panel that we looked at before. Click on the tool
and you can see a grid with corner handles appear over your
image, as well as a panel of other tools and options appear
below the panel.3
A quicker and more precise way to straighten a tilted
horizon or leaning vertical is to use the Straighten Tool.
You’ll find this on the left-hand side of the options panel below
the edit tool bar when you click on the Crop & Straighten tool.
It’s the circular icon with a picture of a spirit level in it. Click on
this icon to activate the tool.2 If you place your mouse cursor anywhere on the grey
border of the workspace outside the image, you can see
that it changes to a double-ended curved arrow, indicating
rotation. Click anywhere in this area and you’ll see a grid appear
over your image. You can simply drag the image around until
your horizon lines up with the grid.4 To use the Straighten Tool on a tilted horizon, simply
click on one end of the horizon line and drag a line along
it. As soon as you release the Mouse button Lightroom will
automatically rotate the image to make the line horizontal.
Note that it also constrains the rotated image within the
original size of the frame.This tutorial
content is
available for
download62
IMPROVE YOUR IMAGE: THE DEVELOP MODULE
BDM’s Made Easy Series | Volume 22