How To Straighten Your Horizon, Without Cropping In Photoshop

On this quick video photographer Steve Perry (from backcountrygallery) looks at two tricks for straightening the horizon in landscape images in Photoshop.

Typically the way to make your images straight in Photoshop is to use the straightening crop tool. The drawback is that you loose some of the image in the edges of the frame. Sometimes it is O.K. but in other cases you might like the original composition and want to keep it.

Here comes Perry with his own method (which has two versions – both pretty similar) – the idea is to use the warp tool for the edges of the frame. Now this can work pretty nicely for some landscape images but it does have some drawbacks – first of all it adds a bit of distortion (after all you are pushing and pulling on parts of the image), the second problem is that this can make your image a bit softer (but you can add just a tiny bit more sharpening to fix that).

At the end of the day this is just another method that you can work with – it won’t be perfect for every photo (especially for architecture we would not recommend this), but for landscape images with mostly natural objects it might do that trick – try it and let us know.

You can check out many more helpful photography tips on our Photography tips section here on LensVid. We have a special page dedicated to Perry ‘s videos which you can find here.

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.