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Tip #11: Straighten a Photo
By: Donna Chapman (Photoshop CS2)So you’ve gone out and taken loads of pictures just to get home and find
that the one that would be perfect is off kilter and just doesn’t look quite right.
Well plug your self up to your computer and grab your Photoshop CS2, because
this is not as hard as you might think. It use to be that you would have to
guestimate how much you would need to rotate the canvas and go back and
forth until you thought it looked straight. This happened with one of mine and
I thought it was perfect, then I showed it to my professor and the first words
out of his mouth were “You know it’s crooked right?” UGH! I just wanted to
scream. Hopefully you will never have to go through that situation because I am
going to show you the quick precise way of straightening your photo.
When you look at the toolbar you will find that it automatically comes up with an eyedropper a little more than midway down on the right side of the bar. Hold
down on the corner of the eyedropper for a moment and it will show you a little
tool that looks like a ruler. This is called the measuring tool. Select it and then
click on the uppermost spot of the photo that you would like to straighten and
drag it straight down to the spot on the bottom of the photo that should line up
vertically with the top (yes this works horizontally as well) as in the picture below.
Click on Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary
It will then show you automatically how much the angle needs to be adjusted.
Just press OK
Don’t worry that it looks weird because now it is just a case of cropping
the image.
Using the crop tool (third down on the left side of the toolbar) start at one
corner and pull down and across to the other corner so that the whole selected
area is within the crop lines.
Click on the crop tool again and tell it to crop. TA DA a perfectly straight picture.
Photoshop Tip #11: Donna Chapman donnaichapman@yahoo.com
