Learn How to Use Photoshop Elements

Lesson Info

Straighten an Image in Quick Fix

One last thing here that's really pretty cool is the ability to straighten our images. So I know that you guys at home never do this where you take a photo that is a little bit crooked. I'm the only person, I'm sure, who does. But I'm really grateful then that I have this tool. If you were to accidentally take a crooked photo as well, you might also find this really handy. Over here in the tool bar there is this tool that looks like a level that you would use when you're hanging cabinets or hanging a photo or something. So this is the tool we want, it's just called the Straighten tool. Incidentally, any of these tools, you'll notice when the tag pops up and there's a letter in parentheses, that letter represents the keyboard shortcut for that tool. So that means that wherever I am, if I've got the Move tool down here, and I want to grab the Straighten tool, I can just press P on my keyboard and it'll switch. So the way that this works is pretty simple. You find a photo that's crooked a...

nd you want to straighten it. And all you have to do is click along this line that you want to straighten. So in this case it's my horizon. So I'm clicking here and I'm holding my mouse down, and I'm just gonna drag along that crooked line, and then I'm gonna let go, and PhotoShop's gonna measure that crooked slope and then it's gonna straighten it. And then, because I told it to maintain the image size and auto-fill the edges, it went ahead, straightened the image, and then filled in the edges for me. So I didn't even have to crop this photo. Normally you would have to crop. When you straighten a photo there's always gonna be some cropping, unless you're working with an image where you can do this. Now this auto-fill in the edges is not gonna work on every photo. This image was a good candidate because it's just a blurry, rainy sunset photo shot through a window. But if I had a lot of detail here, if I had a photo of, like I'm at a football game and there's a lot of people in the crowd or something, auto-filling in the people around the edges might not work out as nicely as this. Lemme show you what that looks like. If I undo this, and we'll turn off Auto Fill. And then our choices are to Maintain the Canvas Size or to Maintain the Image Size. Well just go ahead and leave that there, and I'm just gonna re-run this. Now you'll see what happens. This is why you end up having to crop when you straighten a crooked photo, because when you skew it to straighten it, you create these wedges, as they are affectionately called. So fixing those requires the crop tool or some auto-fill magic in Photoshop.

We all have hundreds of images on our smartphones and cameras that we never do anything with. Adobe Photoshop Elements is the perfect tool for beginners to use for organizing and editing those images. Khara Plicanic will show you the practical ways to use this software by using step-by-step projects you can follow along with at home. You’ll get hands-on practice at making selections and working with layers, doing simple retouching, and adding text to your images.

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