Horizons - Straight Talking

“That’s a great photo, is the horizon straight though?” It’s a question you may have been asked or asked yourself at some time. It’s also one thing that photographers, especially beginners, overlook when first processing images. A couple of reasons for this could be, photographers using JPEG’s straight out of camera and uploading without processing or not having access to software or the knowledge of its use to fix the problem. But, never fear this is an easy fix and should be one of your first ports of call when deciding what to do with your photos.

Lightroom

So, what are your options? If your using Lightroom it’s just a couple of clicks and your good to go. In the develop module click on the crop icon (the square box above the basic panel) and this will open a drop-down box. In the box, you'll see a slider bar, moving this left or right rotates the image straightening the horizon line, It's that simple. Another way to level the image is to use the spirit level tool, the one with "Angle" beside it. Click on the spirit level and your cursor will change to a cross with an icon beneath it. Move this over the image, left click the mouse and draw a line following the horizon, when you let go of the mouse button Lightroom automatically straightens the image.

Photoshop CC

The Photoshop straightening tool is much the same as the spirit level in Lightroom. To find this tool click on the crop icon in the side bar, this will change the top bar into crop view mode. In the top bar, you'll see the spirit level with the word straighten after it, left click on this and your cursor will change to a cross with an icon below it. Now it's the same process as in Lightroom, left click on the image and draw a line following the horizon.

To Finish the process don’t forget to click the tick icon, Photoshop will then automatically rotate and crop the image.

Capture7

Capture 8

Capture 9

One thing to consider when straightening horizon’s is, the software doing the processing will crop the image. This is due to the rotation of the image, if left you would end up with the whole photo slanted, so cropping squares everything back to how it should be. How much cropping is done depends on how much the horizon was out in the first place, if it was severe enough it could put the whole composition out.

If you don’t have Lightroom or Photoshop there’s no need to worry, this option is pretty much universal to all photo editors. Even if you don’t have a paid for photo editor there are plenty free online, just do a search, the process of straightening is also similar so, no issues when using one for the first time.