Tilted BG Question

GraphyFotoz

Can someone walk me threw (CS2)how to fix a tilted building in the BG of a shot?
I have an older pic taken with my 828 at wide angle.

Seems like mid photo back is all tilted to the right.
It needs other tweaks too but wanna get the important part out of the way 1st!

Musta been how the camera was at wide angle cuz my current 28-70mm don't do it. :dunno

Looks like it might be complicated? :scratch
(I do have a coupla 828 Plug-in's but dunno if I have one for this)
If it is I can email the file to someone 3.3mb to help with the fix.
It's one on best and fav Steamer shots and would love to give it a proper fix-n-print.

Here is the small scale of it

Richard

I just did a quick rotation in transform till it looked reasonable. The hills don't need to be level at all, but the right angles of the buildings and train had to be changed to be parallel with the frame border..

Looking at it again, I think I should have gone another half a degree or so counter clockwise. If this is too coarse a solution, you can rotate first then do some fine tuning with perspective adjustment when you crop. It's getting late in Madrid to do fine tuning, though, so I'll leave that to other more alert grinners.

Cheers,

Dee

The measure tool in Photoshop...
Load your photo into photoshop
On the tool menu find on the right, 10 boxes down from the top the eyedropper box (your tool may show any of the three). Click on it, and select the thing that looks like a tilted (pun, get it? ) ruler.

Dee

Fixing rotation the easy way
Now, you will have a plus sign as your cursor.

Find a place that should be straight up and down (or straight from side to side)

Start at the top (or the bottom I think) Click, hold and drag to the bottom (or top) of the area you want to measure against. I usually drag from top to bottom and left to right -- but I'm nost sure if it matters.

Here I've labeled the photo start and end.

Dee

straightening the easy way
Release the mouse button

Go to menu / image / rotate canvas

Choose arbiterary

A window appears showing the angle the image will be rotated, note also the direction of CW and CCW...

Dee

The result
Here is the rotated photo. You will see that the edges of the building are not square to each other.

Now you can decide on cropping and/or cloning areas that you do not wish to crop off, like the sky.

You can go to menu / edit / free transform and play with some of those.

Hope this helps.

gus

Thanks very much Dee...i always use arbitrary but never knew of the 'ruler' to get a decimal place. Great tip

DavidTO

gus wrote:

Thanks very much Dee...i always use arbitrary but never knew of the 'ruler' to get a decimal place. Great tip

In ACR you draw the line and the software does all the work for you, rotating and cropping. I never understood why PS doesn't do the same, at least as an option. While Dee's method is the way to go to get accurate verticals, it's a PITA compared to ACR.

gus

DavidTO wrote:

In ACR you draw the line and the software does all the work for you, rotating and cropping. I never understood why PS doesn't do the same, at least as an option. While Dee's method is the way to go to get accurate verticals, it's a PITA compared to ACR.

Its individual...i recon ACR is a PITA.

DavidTO

gus wrote:

Its individual...i recon ACR is a PITA.

Totally individual. But why this feature is in ACR and not PS is beyond me. It makes straightening horizons so easy.

Dee

Huh?

DavidTO wrote:

In ACR you draw the line and the software does all the work for you, rotating and cropping. I never understood why PS doesn't do the same, at least as an option. While Dee's method is the way to go to get accurate verticals, it's a PITA compared to ACR.

I don't want PSD to automatically crop my rotated photo FOR me!!! I'd rather make that choice myself :-)

I never intended to say that the measure tool can ONLY be used for verticals... I mentioned you can use the measure tool to get accurate horizontals TOO... (use it for straight side to side) I use it all the time for my ocean/sky shots.

And if one has a jpg file only... can one use ACR for the jpg file???

You can learn something new every day, and some days more than one thing, right? :-)

DavidTO

Dee wrote:

I don't want PSD to automatically crop my rotated photo FOR me!!! I'd rather make that choice myself :-)

I just want the option. Drag a line, it rotates it to vertical or horizontal, and then crops just enough to the new rotation. I think that's a brilliant feature. Not that you'd HAVE to use it, but at least you could.

DavidTO

Dee wrote:

And if one has a jpg file only... can one use ACR for the jpg file???

I think so in CS3.

Dee

I don't have CS2
So I can't beta CS3. I'm hoping to connect with an Adobe employee for a friends and family discount :-)

I bought CS that way, but didn't want to upgrade until CS3.

It will be cool if ACR works with jpgs!

Stustaff

A much easier way is open the crop tool make a small square, then rotate the small square so one of the sides is on the edge of the building.

Then expand the crop square and press enter, Job done.