Photoshop Elements 8 for Windows: The Missing Manual

Straightening the Contents of an Image

What about all those photos you've taken where the main subject (a person or a building, say) isn't quite straight? You can flip those pictures around forever, but if your camera was off-kilter when you snapped the shot, your subjects will still lean like a certain tower in Pisa. Elements has planned for this problem, too, by including a nifty Straighten tool that makes adjusting the horizon as easy as drawing a line.

Note

About 95 percent of the time, the Straighten tool does the trick. But in the few cases where you can't get things looking perfect, you can still use the old-school Elements method—the Free Rotate Layer command, described on Free Rotate Layer.

Straighten Tool

If you can never seem to hold a camera perfectly level, you'll love Elements' Straighten tool. It lives just below the Cookie Cutter tool (or next to it if you have two columns) in the Full Editor's Tools panel. To straighten a crooked photo:

1. Open the photo, and then activate the Straighten tool.

   Its icon is two little photos, one crooked and one not. Or, on the keyboard, just press P.

2. Make any changes to the tool's Options bar settings tool before you use it.

   Your choices are described after this list.

3. Tell Elements where the horizon is.

   Drag to draw a line in your photo to show Elements where horizontal should be. Figure 3-4 shows how—by drawing a line that traces the boundary between the ocean and the sky. Your line appears at an angle when you draw it. That's fine, because ...