Horizon Straightening part II

FacZen Photography Tips Straighten that Horizon (Part II) As I said, I'm going to show you how to straighten those horizons in PhotoShop. I use CS3, but I think it's been available in earlier versions as well. It's really quite easy. Open your photo in PhotoShop (I'll call it "PS" or "CS3" from now on) -- I'll use the same example I used the other day: Now find the "ruler" tool. It's hiding behind the eyedropper. Click and drag a line on an object -- or the horizon -- that you want to be level in the shot. Click on the picture to blow it up if you can't see the line well. PS remembers the angle that you drew the line. So now click on Image>Rotate Canvas and select "Arbitrary". PS brings up a little dialog box and all you have to do is click "OK", this is what happens: Now you can use the conventional crop tool to crop your image straight. Sometimes, you might want to straighten an image which has, for instance, a slanted wall or tree, but rotating the whole image wouldn't work for you. Here's an example: I chose this image because it has some very extreme lines to straighten -- although I quite like the effect and wouldn't do anything to it in real life. PS won't actually let you do this in one shot because it's so extreme, but you can for most images. A word about the cropping tool. You can preset the finished (cropped) size after selecting the tool but before starting the crop. Be sure to include the characters "px" for "pixels" or "in" for inches, etc. I want a 4200 px x 2800 px image, so that's what I key in. You can also create a preset for a size you use frequently. OK, now start the crop. Drag over the picture and it'll select the area you want to keep, proportioned correctly according to your preset. Don't activate the crop yet -- notice the menu bar has changed: and there's a check box available called "perspective". Check it. OK. Now you can drag the individual corners of your crop wherever you want. For instance, I dragged it to make the edge of the picture parallel to the tree on the left, then I double-clicked on the image to accept the crop: Now do the same thing on the other side, and you're done (sometimes you can do both at once, but with this image it was too extreme and it didn't work). Powerful, isn't it? If you're an oldtimer and you remember view cameras, it's almost like tilting the back of your 4x5 to match the perspective of that building you're shooting. There you go. Not so tough...

Winning Images

So I can't help but blow my own horn (if I don't do it, who will?). Tonight at the Richmond Hill Camera Club, 3 of the 4 images I submitted won placements in the club competition. In increasing order:

"Water Hazard". This scored the most points of the three, 8+8+8=24 but it was not on the assigned topic so it came 3rd in the advanced class under "Pictorial" images. The judges thought it had great timing, great flow and movement, rich and strong colours. They wondered if it had been over-sharpened.

Canoe in the Mist. No specific comments but they loved the image. It tied for 2nd place in the advanced group, assigned category. 7+8+7=22 points.

Beached Canoe at Dawn. This tied for 1st place in the advanced group, 8+9+6=23 points. Note the low score from the "Russian Judge". The assigned category was "landscapes, seascapes, cityscapes" and he thought it was off-topic because it was a picture of a canoe, not a landscape, so he down-scored it.

The 4th image I submitted was the Blacksmith shot (below a couple of days). When it was shown at the judging, there were some artifacts on the left and at the top but when I reviewed the image later, they were not there. It may have had something to do with the computer setup at the judging. Anyway, the image was marked down for that reason.

I'm rather pleased: 3 out of 4 images placed.

FacZen Photography Tips Straighten that Horizon Time and again, competition judges have been heard to say, "The horizon isn't level, so I deducted a point from the score." Is that only in competitions, or is it also important in other applications? Truth is, it's always important. It's one of those rules of composition, like the "rule of thirds" where it's something to be watched for. If the horizon isn't straight, the viewer has the immediate feeling that there's something wrong with the image. That's if it's a little off. If it's 'way off, perhaps the maker had a reason to make it that way -- to unbalance the viewer? To change the perspective? To force the eye in a certain direction? So how do you do it? Well there are some great tools in both Camera Raw and PhotoShop CS3. Here's an example and how to fix it in Camera Raw. Here's an image where the horizon is slanted. Open the image in Camera Raw. Select the "straighten" tool from the row of icons at the top of the image (it's the 6th one from the left, looks like an angle thingy), and drag a line along the horizon (or any object in the image that you want to be either horizontal or vertical... if you blow up this picture you can see where I dragged the line. As soon as you let go of the mouse button, Camera Raw rotates the image to match the line you drew. It also crops it automatically as big as it can within the frame. Now when you open the image, PhotoShop takes the cropped, rotated piece as its own! Voila! Straight horizon with no pain. I wish everything would be so easy. By the way it also does the same thing with vertical lines. Incidentally, no, I didn't take an image at an angle like that -- I fiddled it so that it would be obvious how it works. Neat clouds, though! In my next post, I'll show you how to do the same thing in PhotoShop CS3, and we'll talk about resizing images.