Advanced' Photography Tutorials

This is a quick tip to straighten up your horizons or verticals in Photoshop. It take the hassle out of trying to guess exactly how much of a degree an angle is out on your image. Lets start with my image of the red lighthouse

As you can see the horizon is way off in this image. We are going to select the "measure tool", this can be found under the same button as the "eye dropper" Left click the eye dropper tool and hold, then you will see it expand to show the measure tool.

Once you select the measure tool, go to the image and left click and hold where you want the measure tool to start (this would be on the line you want to straighten) still holding the left click move your mouse to the point where you want to measure the angle, release the mouse and you will see the measure points on the image. These points can be left clicked/hold to reposition the points for more accuracy. I would suggest zooming into your image to ensure accuracy of the placement of the line, as below.

Once you are happy with the placement of the measure tool line we are going to go to Image, Rotate Canvas, Arbitrary.

This should open a "rotate canvas" , you will see an angle showing (2.13 in this case) This is the angle that the measure tool has worked out that needs adjusted, it has also suggested which direction the angle needs to be adjusted, counter clockwise in this case also. All you have to do is click OK.

The image will now be rotated by the 2.13 degrees CCW, you can see below how this has rotated the whole image.

All that is left now is to crop your image to remove the rotated canvas edges. As you will notice, we have a nice straight horizon, all worked out for you :)

This is a very quick tip, but can save you time on straightening your images. This works equally well on verticals.

Exaspera said: