We've all seen those MLS real estate photos where the vertical lines are going every which way . . . except straight up and down. In a recent post, as a Calgary real estate Photographer, I've already discussed how to avoid that while you are taking the pictures.
But what do you do if you didn't get it quite right at the time? That's what were here to discuss!
Take this shot from Calgary, Alberta, for example:
I actually do my exterior real estate photography from an elevated pole, so it is not unusual to have the verticals a little off. But I've seen worse! :-)
I use Photoshop Lightroom as my main image developing/quick editing/photo organizing software, but any program will have the same options to rotate or straighten the image. We'll use Picasa for this example, since it's a freebie! Anyone can use it, or rather, everyone should use it . . . so no excuses.
1) After you've loaded the program, load your image by double-clicking on it in the visual library.
2) Look on the left side of the screen on the Basic Fixes tab. Click on Straighten.
3) You'll see a little slider below the image, with the Apply and Cancel buttons to the right. Drag the control knob left and right along the slider until you are happy with how the edges line up with the grid.
4) Click Apply when you are done. So simple! I'd do a little cropping to get rid of some of the neighboring units in the image (Crop Function), but before we do that, let's look more closely at the image.
I'm honing in on the light tan building in the center of the photo. If you look just a little to the right of center, you'll see the grid line is pretty close to being lined up along the corner of this portion of the building. It's not quite perfect, but not bad. Look over to the left . . . it's much more off. So even though we've improved this photo and could keep it, I'm still not happy with the results.
The reason we can't get it perfectly straight on both sides no matter how much you move that slider around, is because the camera was tilted a little (forward or backward) causing the plane of the lens to not be parallel to the front plane of the building (if you follow). We could just choose to keep this result, but I'll show you how to get it bang on!
Save this image just in case, but we're going to use a different program called PTLens. It's a must on my desktop! Any image with strong verticals goes from Lightroom to PTLens in my post-processing flow (there is an add-on for Lightroom from PTLens). This program is about $20, and makes lens corrections amazingly simple!
So here we are in PTLens:
Look below the center of the image. This great little program has read the EXIF data buried in my image file, and has applied a lens correction specific to the camera and lens that I shot the photo with! (The G11 is Canon's most advanced Point-and-Shoot. I won't put my $1500 DSLR up on the pole with my $1200 lens!) This removes some barrel distortion from the image, which you probably didn't notice before, but will see it now that it is gone! I love it!
Uncorrected . . . see the slight bulge in the building??
Corrected below . . . bulging gone!
Anyway, if you do not see it, import a photo into PTLens and keep turning the Preview off and on. I'm positive you will see what it does. It really adds a sharpness to the lines that does mentally register to a viewer -- trust me.
Now, onto fixing the slight flaring verticals.
Over on the right, you will see the PTLens Controls:
1) Right at the bottom of this area, there is a Grid slider. Just drag the little button and you will see gridlines appear over your image. I like to have my grid fairly small so that I can be more precise.
2) Then slide the Vertical Control to see your image "tilt" forward and back. Keep your eye on a vertical edge in the image to see which way you should drag the control to correct it.
3) Now, you're not likely to get all the verticals dead on with this control alone. You will have to use the Vertical control, along with the Rotate control to get it right. It takes a little practice to figure it out, but the more you play with it, the easier it becomes!
I initially use the Vertical control until it's close, and then I add a little rotation to bring everything in line. For my image that I started with, I had the Vertical control set to 7, and the Rotate set to -1.6.
4) Click OK when you're done.
5) With a little cropping, and some lighting adjustments, here is my finished product (winter doesn't have to look so cold!)
So, now you know two different methods to straighten your photos! One is pretty simple with free software and does a pretty decent job -- way better than leaving it crooked, that's for sure! The other takes the know-how up a notch, but it's still pretty easy and gets bang on results!
Happy trimming.
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