Crooked Horizons in your Photos? - 5 Minute Digital Fix
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Film camera in hand, you would see that perfect landscape,
seascape or sunset and shoot off several shots.
Perhaps a couple of weeks later, once you had returned home and
finally finished that 24 or 36 exposure film, it was off
to the photo-lab to get the film processed.
You eagerly open the packet of photographs, looking for that
superb seascape you took, knowing that it would almost certainly
be taken up by National Geographic for their monthly
magazine spread.
What do you find?
A not too bad photo, but the seascape horizon is crooked, heres
your excuse, I hear you say.. Well when I took the shot I was
standing on the side of a sand dune and quickly trying to get
that perfect shot while the little sailboat was still in view.
Does this sound familiar to all you budding Adam Ansels
and/or Lord Snowdons?
The photo is relegated back to the packet never again to see the
light of day.
I had many of those packets of not so perfect photos until the
digital photography age arrived.
The Digital Darkroom has arrived
The advent of the digital camera and in fact, before that,
computerized image manipulation software such as Adobe
Photoshop has completely revolutionized the way we can now
resurrect a stunning image from what at face value might have
appeared to be just one of those snapshots to be relegated to
the shoebox under the stairs.
What Im going to show you in this article is just one
method of taking a mundane snapshot and producing a great
shot in as little as five minutes.
The example Im going to use, is one that I have seen so many
times, and have already mentioned above, namely, shots that have
crooked horizons, whether this be a landscape, seascape,
sunset or whatever.
The source of the image may have come from a scanned negative,
scanned print or digital camera image all converted to an image
format (most probably .JPG pronounced jaypeg) that can
be opened in your image manipulation software.
Correcting a crooked horizon
The human eye is remarkably perceptive at picking out features
in a photograph that are made up of essentially straight lines
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vertically, with the overall print itself.
These straight lines may well be the horizon, but they may also
be an object in your photo that has straight lines such as
buildings or walls etc ..
I will be using Adobe Photoshop CS, but almost all other
image manipulation software packages have similar tools so the
method described should be repeatable with your own software
package.
The method used will employ a little known relationship between
two Photoshop functions, the Measure tool and the
Rotate Canvas command.
Step 1 Open up your image in your image editor (in our
case Photoshop) and select the Measure tool which
if not visible on the Photoshop toolbar can be found by
hovering your mouse over the Eyedropper tool and left
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Watch the other options window fly-out and select the
Measure tool.
Step 2 Interestingly enough, we are not actually going
to measure anything in the real sense of the word, nor use the
Measure tool as it is usually used (i.e. measuring the
distance between two points within the photograph).
With the Measure tool active, left click and hold on
a spot on the left hand side of the photo (remember our example
is a seascape) where the horizon meets the sea.
While still holding down the left mouse button, drag to the
right hand side of the photo and find a corresponding point
where the horizon meets the sea and then release the mouse
button.
What happened? .. Well you will see that a white line has
been drawn on top of the photo with what looks like little
+ anchors at each end. The line is parallel with
our crooked horizon.
Step 3 Now the marvel begins!! Select the
Image->Rotate Canvas->Arbitrary command and the
Rotate Canvas pop-up window will appear.
What you will notice (in the case of Photoshop anyway) is
that it has pre-filled the pop-up rotate options with
the exact rotation information to correct the crooked
horizon, 1.5 degrees counter-clockwise in our example on
our web-site. Click OK and see what happens ..
The photo has been magically rotated the right amount to correct
the crooked horizon!
Step 4 All that is required now is to do a tight crop
on the overall photograph and save it.
And there you have it!! Less than five minutes of digital image
manipulation to take that mundane snapshot into a photograph
that is very pleasing to the eye.
If you find the steps taking are a little hard to understand in
this text based article, you can click on the link at the end of
this article to see the same method explained on our website
with the aid of example graphical images.
Gary Wilkinson 2005 - All Rights Reserved
You can see this correction method complete with example
images at
http://www.restoring-photos-made-easy.com/Basic-Correction-of-
Crooked-Horizon-Photos.html
Feel free to re-print this article provided that all
hyperlinks and author biography are retained as-is.
About the author:
Gary Wilkinson is a photographer, photographic restorer
and the owner of a photographic retail business.
He is also the publisher of the www.restoring-ph
otos-made-easy.com website, where other methods of
correcting common photographic restoration problems are
discussed.