Tutorials

Photoshop Tutorial - Aligning pictures

4,768 views By Lars Koudal ⋅ January 3, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅ Post a comment

Based on the feedback I got from another tutorial, Retouching pictures , where people were asking how to fix the alignment of the horizon, I decided to create a new tutorial for this specific task.

The process for aligning the horizon is simple in itself, but it provides a problem for the result.

I will use the following, retouched picture from the previous tutorial for this additional tutorial:

Aligning the horizon

The procedure is quite simple.

• Turn on the ruler (CTRL-R)
  
• Create a guide by clicking on the horizontal ruler, and dragging it down to where the horizon should be. (Don’t worry about positioning it perfectly, it can be moved afterwards).
• Zoom in on the proposed horizon area, and move the guide to the best position. The more precise you are, the better.
  
• Duplicate the background layer (assuming you are working on a flattened image).
• Turn of the background layer (the original) so you can better see what you are doing
• Go into transformation mode (CTRL-T)
• Position the center-point anywhere on the guide you set up for horizontal alignment. (If you have snap to guides turned on, it will snap to it automatically).
  
• Rotate the picture to achieve horizontal alignment.
• Press Enter when you are done.

The rotated image.

It looks better now with horizontal alignment, but we have a new problem with the aligned picture. There are blank areas (I have marked those with red for clarification) where we moved the picture around to correct for horizontal alignment, and we will have to deal with that.

Correcting the aligned picture

There are two methods you can choose for correcting the aligned picture. You can either choose to crop the picture to remove the blank space, or you can fill them out using retouching techniques (see the previously mentioned tutorial for an example of how to do that).

In this particular case, cropping the blank areas will crop out the top of the mans head, but it cannot be helped. The other alternative is to approximate the sorrounding blank areas, and add material from the original image to fill out the blanks. This can either be easy or hard, depending on which areas need updating. Some pictures might not even need it, if you are lucky.

The cropped, aligned retouched picture. I personally prefer to leave the picture without horizontal alignment, simply because cropping the mans head looks worse than keeping the background crooked, but that is a matter of personal opinion.

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