From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Removing distortions and cropping photos - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

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Removing distortions and cropping photos

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- [Instructor] Camera Raw has several different tools for correcting lens distortions, adjusting the perspective and cropping and straightening images. I'm going to select the small house image and then click on the open in Camera Raw icon. Now, depending on the quality as well as the focal lengths of the lens that you use to capture the image, you may or may not see any distortion in your image caused by the lens. Typically, the distortion is much more noticeable with wide angle lenses and it gets worse in high contrast areas like along the edge of the file, as well as with less expensive lenses. So we can see underneath the histogram that Photoshop is able to read the exif data. And in fact, this image was taken with a 24 millimeter lens, so wide, not super wide, but a pretty wide angle lens. I'll go ahead and zoom into this top area of the rocks, and we can see this misalignment of pixels where there's some green area here and then some magenta area here, and that's called chromatic aberration and it's really easy to get rid of. In the optics panel, I can just choose to remove chromatic aberration. All right, I'll click in the image in order to zoom out. And in order to remove any distortion created by the lens, I can use the use profile corrections. Now, if I use the disclosure triangle, we can see that again, Camera Raw knows the make and model of the camera and lens that was used to capture this image, and so it's going to automatically apply the correct profile. All right, to correct the perspective of this image, I'll use the geometry panel. Here, we can click through the different upright options. I can choose auto or just level the image. I can do a vertical correction or a full correction. But if none of these give you the result that you want, we can also use the guided correction and draw our own guides. So we can draw up to four guides. I'm going to start with some vertical guides and I'm going to use these boards in this house in order to correct the perspective. Now as I position my cursor over the image, we can see I get the loop. We can turn that off if we don't want it, or we can hold down the Command key on Mac or Control key on Windows, and then zoom in to be more accurate. So I'm going to start here on the edge of this board and start dragging down. But then I'll hold down Command again and click in order to zoom out, because I want to go ahead and just drag this right down to the bottom. All right, I'll add a second guide over here on the right and just click and drag down in the image. And we can see that it's correcting that perspective. We could add another horizontal guide on the top of these windows, and we could add a fourth guide if we wanted to, but I don't think I need to on this image. We can also toggle the grid overlay if we want to see a grid on the image. We can change the grid size as well as the opacity. All right, I'll toggle that off for now. And one other shortcut, if you hold down the Option key on Mac or the Alt key on Windows, as you drag one of the guides, it will decrease how quickly you can drag it so that you can be more accurate as you create your perspective corrections. After applying a strong upright adjustment, we can use the manual transformations as well, so we can change the vertical or horizontal options. If we want to reset them, we can just double click on the tick mark. We can also rotate it or change the aspect, which can be very convenient if you need to crop this to a specific aspect ratio and your image isn't quite fitting within that aspect ratio. You can scale it and then also offset it on either the X or the Y axis. All right, let's tap the C key or select the crop tool to remove some distracting elements. We can use any of the anchor points to change the size of the crop. We can click and drag within the crop in order to reposition it, and we can click and drag outside of the crop marquee in order to rotate the crop. If I want to swap the crop from horizontal to vertical, I can use this icon right here. And instead of rotating it, I can always use the angle slider or I can double click on that to reset it. There's also an angle tool that I can click and drag along a horizon for example, if I want to set the level of the image. All right, let's reset that and I'm going to change the aspect ratio to four by five and then reposition the crop as well as resize it. Now all of these adjustments are non-destructive, so I could always come back at any time and make additional changes. It is important to know that when you're cropping your image in Camera Raw, you're not setting the actual pixel dimensions with the crop tool. You're only setting the aspect ratio, and then you'll set the exact pixel dimensions when you choose to save the file or when you choose to edit it or open it into Photoshop. I'll tap the E key in order to return to the edit settings, and then I'll apply those settings by clicking done. And in Bridge, we can see the settings applied as well as the icons for the setting in the thumbnail. So there you go, some quick tools for correcting lens distortions, adjusting perspective, and cropping and straightening images in Camera Raw.

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