Photoshop Elements 4: The Missing Manual

Straightening the Contents of Your Image

What about all those photos you've taken where the content 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 lean like a certain tower in Pisa. Elements has planned for this problem, too. Elements 4 includes a nifty new Straighten tool that makes adjusting the horizon as easy as drawing a line.

Tip

About 95 percent of the time, the Straighten tool will do the trick. But for the few cases where you can't get things looking perfect, you can still use the old school Elements method—the Free Rotate command, which is described on Section 3.3.2.

Straighten Tool

Ever since Elements 1, people have been asking Adobe for an easier way to straighten up the content of their photos. In Elements 4, Adobe comes through in a big way with its new Straighten tool. If you can draw a line, you can straighten a photo with this tool.

The Straighten tool lives just below the Cookie Cutter tool in the Standard Editor's toolbox. To straighten your photo:

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

   Its icon is two little photos, one crooked and one not. To activate the Straighten tool, click the icon or press P.

2. Make any changes to the Options bar settings for the Straighten tool before you use the tool.

   Your choices are described below.

3. Tell Elements where the horizon is.

   Drag a line in your photo to show Elements where horizontal should be. Figure 3-4 shows ...