USING THE CROP & STRAIGHTEN TOOL
5 The Straighten Tool also works on leaning verticals. To
save a toppling building, activate the tool by clicking
on the icon and then click and drag a line up or down a line
on the image that should be vertical, such as the side of a
structure. Again, as soon as you release the Mouse button the
image will automatically be straightened.
6
The Crop & Straighten tool offers a third option for
rotating your image. Next to the Straighten Tool you’ll see
a slider. If you drag this slider right and left, you’ll see that it
rotates the image clockwise and anticlockwise. This is useful if
you want to tilt an otherwise level shot. You can also enter the
degree of tilt numerically.
9
You’ll see a crop frame grid overlay your image, with
drag points in each corner and in the middle of each
side. When you click on and drag one of these points in any
direction you’ll see the cropping frame move, with the areas
outside it slightly greyed out. It also includes a “rule of thirds”
grid to help with classical composition.7 There is yet another option for levelling your shots. If you
open the Transform tools you’ll see a panel of buttons in
the options panel, including one marked Level. If you click on
this button, Lightroom will attempt to automatically straighten
your image. Note that this is based on pattern recognition and is
therefore not 100 per cent reliable.
10 You can crop to a specific aspect ratio or image size by
clicking to the right of where it says Aspect to open the
context menu. You can select a preset ratio or size or enter your
own manually. Note that the padlock icon next to the menu
changes, to indicate that the aspect ratio is now locked to the
dimensions that you’ve set.8 Cropping your image to improve composition is very simple.
When you open the Crop & Straighten tool it defaults to
the crop tool straight away; but if you’ve previously been using
the Straighten tool you’ll need to click on the round icon with a
picture of a darkroom crop-frame tool to switch the tool back into
cropping mode.http://www.bdmpublications.com 63