Let's Get One Thing Straight

Spofford Lake Leaning

I have just a short rant this week about leaning horizon lines and, for those who just don't care - you should. It just drives me nuts to see beautifully captured images with wonderful color, sharpness and composition, but when I look at the horizon I feel like I'm about to fall over. Of course there may occasionally be legitimate artistic reasons to intentionally throw the horizon out of balance, but in the majority of cases it simply means that the photographer either didn't bother to do the correction or doesn't know how. Sadly, despite all care when capturing images, it is almost impossible to totally avoid unbalanced horizons, so the solution must frequently come at post. The bad news is that a leaning horizon can seriously distract from an otherwise beautiful image. The good news is that the process of straightening horizons is one of the simplest editing tasks that can be performed.

 

Essentially every photo editing program has a method of rotating images. Often the horizon line can be adequately leveled by eye, perhaps with the help of a grid, but in Photoshop there is a nice way to rotate the horizon into plumb quickly and precisely.

 

"Arbitrary" Rotation Tool

In the image of reeds on Spofford Lake I was hand holding the camera and inevitably got the horizon leaning to the right. To correct the problem in Photoshop I first used the Ruler Tool to draw a straight line along the unleveled horizon. Going to the "Image Rotation" function in the Image menu drop down, I selected "Arbitrary" and the window opened with the angle defined by the ruler line already entered into the selection box. I Pressed "OK" and I was done - the program rotated the image to make both the ruler line and the horizon level. That's it!  All that is left to do is to crop the image as required.

 Other editing programs may have different procedures to reach the same goal, but, even if you do nothing else to your images, leveling the horizon is such a simple task that it should be part of your regular routine. Your great images deserve nothing less.