From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Straightening a crooked image - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop 2024 Essential Training

Start my 1-month free trial

Straightening a crooked image

“

- [Instructor] There are several ways that you can straighten an image in Photoshop. In the next few minutes, we're going to take a look at three of the most common. So the first is to select the crop tool. So I'll tap C, and then I'm going to right click or control click on Mac on the crop icon in the options bar and just reset the tool to its default settings. Here we're working on a single layer background document, and I'm going to select the straightened tool. I've got the delete cropped pixels enable, and then I'll just click and drag a horizontal line across the horizon of my image. When I release the cursor, Photoshop puts back the straightened tool and rotates the image based on the angle that I drew. If you don't have a good horizontal line, but a vertical line instead, you can also drag a vertical line and have Photoshop rotate it to that angle. Now because the setting is set to delete crop pixels on our layers panel, you can see we have the background and the crop preview. By default, Photoshop is not going to add any content, meaning that it's not going to expand the canvas, but instead it's going to crop into the image area. If I do drag out, we can see that it's going to fill with a solid color. In this case, it's going to use the background color, which is white. If I uncheck the delete crop pixels, then we will see the transparency checkerboard here, and Photoshop would fill this with transparency. Alright, let's go ahead and reset that. And the second way to straighten an image is also with the crop tool, and it's simply by position your cursor outside of the crop marquee and then clicking and dragging in order to rotate the image to straighten it. All right, let's cancel out of that as well. And I'm going to switch to the ruler tool. The ruler tool is nested with the eyedropper tool, and it's going to allow us to take a measurement in the image, and then we can do one of two different things. If I just click and drag out, well, we can see that Photoshop has taken that measurement in the options bar, and I can choose to straighten the layer. And this can be really handy if you have a multi-layered document and you only want to straighten one of the layers in that document. So when I click straighten layer, it will go ahead and do that. All right, let's undo that using command Z, and I'll drag out another measurement, and then I'll choose image, image rotation. And this time I'll select arbitrary because I just took that measurement Photoshop will enter in the angle. Here I can choose between clockwise and counterclockwise, and when I click okay, regardless of if this is a single layer or a multi-layer document, Photoshop will rotate all of the layers in the document. And there you have it, three ways to straighten a tilted image or layer using the crop, straighten, and ruler tools in Photoshop.

Contents