Learn Photoshop Now .. How To Straighten Crooked Photos

To best way to straighten images in Photoshop is by using the Measure Tool, which takes all the guess work out of it. As we'll see in a moment, as long as there's something in the image that should be straight, Photoshop will do most of the work for us! The Measure Tool, by default, is hiding behind the Eyedropper Tool in the Tools palette, so to select it, you'll need to click and hold your mouse button down on the Eyedropper Tool for a second or two. A fly-out menu will appear showing you the other tools hiding behind it. Click on the Measure Tool to select it.

Look for something in your image that should be straight, either horizontally or vertically. We're going to drag along its edge with the Measure Tool so Photoshop has something to work with when trying to figure out how crooked the photo actually is. In my case, I'm going to click and drag horizontally along the roof of the building directly behind Ms. Liberty. Obviously the roof should be perfectly horizontal, yet it clearly isn't at the moment. I'll simply click once on the left side of the roof, then hold my mouse button down and drag over to the right side of the roof. This draws a thin line between where I first clicked on the left and where I finished dragging on the right, and Photoshop uses the angle of this line to determine how far the image will need to be rotated in order to straighten it.

Click and drag with the Measure Tool along the edge of something in the photo that should be straight horizontally or vertically. If you look up in the Options Bar at the top of the screen, you can see the angle of the line you've just drawn (it's the number listed to the right of the letter "A"). In my case, we can see that my line is on an angle of 1.9 degrees:

The Options Bar should be showing the angle of the line you have drawn with the Measure Tool. Photoshop now uses this angle to find out how far to turn the image in order to straighten it. To find the "Rotate Canvas - Arbitrary" Command Click on the Image menu at the top of the program, choose Rotate Canvas, and then select Arbitrary:

Go to Image > Rotate Canvas > Arbitrary. I have to laugh every time I do this because the word "arbitrary" actually means "random or by chance", yet that's exactly the opposite of what we're doing here. We're not randomly rotating our image or leaving anything to chance. We've used the Measure Tool to find out exactly how much of an angle our image needs to be rotated by, and now Photoshop can use the information we've given it to straighten our image without any guess work. As I've said before, much of the problem with learning Photoshop comes from getting around the terminology, and in this case, I don't know what Adobe was thinking.

However, life goes on. Once you select "Arbitrary", Photoshop pops up the Rotate Canvas dialog box, and as we can see, all the work has already been done for us. In my case, Photoshop has already entered a value of 1.85 for the Angle option, and it even knew that the image will need to be rotated counter-clockwise, which is why the CCW option is also selected:

Photoshop Tutorials: The "Rotate Canvas" dialog box with the angle and direction already selected for us. You may be wondering why Photoshop entered an angle of 1.85 when the Options Bar showed an angle of 1.9 a moment ago. The reason is because Photoshop rounds off the angles in the Options Bar to 1 decimal place, so it showed 1.9 even though the angle of the line we drew with the Measure Tool was actually 1.85. The angle shown in the Rotate Canvas dialog box is the correct angle.

At this point we simply need to click "OK" in the Rotate Canvas dialog box to exit out of it and have Photoshop rotate and straighten our image automatically for us. You should notice that the image has now been rotated and straightened. Everything looks great and fortunately the Statue of Liberty is no longer leaning to the right. Thanks to the Measure Tool and the Rotate Canvas command we were able to straighten the image perfectly without any guess work.

You might notice that there is a minor problem. When we rotated the image inside the document window we created some blank white canvas areas around the outside of the photo. We will want to end things up off by removing those areas using Photoshop's Crop Tool. You can select the Crop Tool from the Tools palette, or simply press the letter C on your keyboard to select it with the shortcut:

Then, with the Crop Tool selected, simply click near the top left corner of your image and drag down towards the bottom right to create a border around the area you want to keep. Fine-tune your selection by dragging any of corner handles or by dragging the top, bottom, left or right sides of the selection:

You can use the Crop Tool to drag a selection area around the portion of the image you want to retain. Once you've dragged out your cropping border, press Enter (Win) / Return (Mac) to have Photoshop crop the image.

By: DavidPeters

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