Perspective correction in Photoshop Elements

When photographing buildings-  if your aim is not an artistic presentation but the exact reproduction of a view – it is rather important for the perspective to be the same in the picture as in real life. The wide-angle lens of your camera makes this difficult as it strangely tilts buildings backward. This perspective distortion can be easily corrected as described in the following article.

Load the photo in Photoshop Elements

First of all, take a good look of the photo and decide what kind of perspective correction you need. In the sample picture, the building tilts backward and a bit to the right.

Covered with a net

In order to determine what’s horizontal and vertical more easily, turn on the grid by clicking View/Grid.

It’s tilted… of course!

This way, you get a grid that shows horizontal and vertical lines to which you can fit the edges in the picture.

Distortion

Now press Ctrl+A to select the whole picture and click Image/Transform/Distort.

Note: Photoshop Elements also contains a Perspective feature (under Image/Transform/Perspective) for this purpose but Distort provides much more options.

Distort draws a border around the picture, with handles on the corners and midpoints. In the Navigator window, shrink the picture until it fits well in the middle of the screen. By dragging the handles of the upper corners, pull them until the edges of the building get parallel with the gridlines. You can drag all handles freely to transform the image as you like. When performing perspective correction, the lower handles are rarely needed.

Towards the sky

If you got the building straight, press Enter to make Elements render the image anew and make your changes effective. Click View/Grid again to clear the gridlines and behold the result.