Saturday, March 5, 2011

How to straighten a KAP photo using photoshop

You’ve just finished a great afternoon of kite aerial photography and are eager to get your photos displayed on your large monitor to see how they came out. The very best photo however is totally crooked. looking at it makes you want to tilt your head in an effort to see it level.

Here is a tutorial on how to straighten that crooked KAP photo using photoshop



The following tutorial uses a PC.
I am using photoshop 7

Step 1) Open photoshop. Click on file > Open > and then browse to the desired picture.


Step 2) click file>save as > and add a letter such as B or C to the end of the file name. doing so preserves the original. Click save.

Step 3) From the top of the page click on Layer > Duplicate Layer > and then click OK. This creates an identical picture on top of your photo. Doing this will allow you to freely manipulate the image.

Step 4) make the background layer invisible by clicking on the eye icon in the layers box


Step 5) from the menu at the top of the page, click on Edit > transform > rotate

Step 6) move your mouse to any point along the outside edge of the photo

Step 7) click and hold the mouse button while moving the mouse either left or right. Pay attention to the horizon in the photo, moving the image until the horizon appears straight. Press Enter.


Step 8) Select the crop tool.


Click and hold in the upper left corner of the photo and drag the mouse to the lower right corner and release the mouse button. Now the entire image is selected for cropping. Click on the lower dotted line at the bottom of the image and drag it up just enough so that the crop will remove the triangle of missing image that was created by rotating the photo. Repeat this step for all four sides of the image. Press enter


Step 9) From the top of the page click on Layer > flatten image, it will ask if you want to discard the hidden layer. Click OK. From the menu at the top of the page click file > Save.

Cropping the image in this way will cause you to lose a little of the original image. The greater the tilt of the original image the more you’ll lose when cropping. So for an alternative to cropping the image you can do the following beginning at step 8.

Alternative Step 8) select your background layer in your layers palette


Alternative step 9) now click on the “set foreground color” and select that color you would like your background to be.

Step 10) Press ALT plus backspace. And the background is filled with the color you selected.

Now you can click Layer > Flatten image. Click on File >Save

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