Review: Customize and alter your photos with PC Image Editor

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

It’s a common misconception that you need Photoshop to get really good looking photos. The truth is that there are many excellent image editors out there on the Internet that allow you to make changes to your photos which are as good as anything Photoshop could do. PC Image Editor is one such app, free for personal use ($24 for business use), which allows you to make changes to your images.

Installation is extremely easy and extremely fast, with no hidden spyware surprises trying to sneak in, such as toolbars. When starting it up for the first time, you will be told that the software is free for personal use, while commercial users need to purchase a license. This becomes one of the main irritants of the entire software app – every time you open up the app to use it for free, that same nag screen is going to keep coming up because you haven’t entered a license code yet. I really hope the developer provides some way in a future release for free users to disable that screen as it gets really annoying after a while.

PC Image Editor provides you with lots of options to customize your images. The photo updates in real time as you tweak each option.

Once you’ve zapped the nag screen, click “open” and navigate to the image you want to make adjustments to. Then on the right hand side, you will see all of the tools  open to you. For example, you can resize the photo to either a size that you specify or one of the predefined sizes that the app offers. You can also rotate to various angles, zoom, sharpen, as well as change the color and contrast .
There are also numerous effects on offer which takes a page out of Photoshop's book. PC Image Editor offers a wide range of filters and effects such as blurring, twirling (turning the picture into a round shape) and changing the angle of the picture. If you would like to achieve a unique effect to the picture, then the filters include embossing, halftone (which pretty much turns the color picture black and white), and changing the RGB values of the colors.

Each adjustment can easily be made by moving the slider back and forth.

Every change is made in real time so you can see how each step of the affects the image. If you realize you’re making a right dog’s dinner of the image, you can click the “undo” button to roll back the last change you made. Once everything is to your satisfaction, you can save or print the new image . Formats which you can save in include all the usual suspects such as JPG, PNG, GIF, BMP and TIFF.

There is also the option to scan an image directly into PC Image Editor using a scanner, but every time I clicked on the “scan” button, PC Image Editor crashed and closed. I don’t know if this is a Windows 8 issue or an issue with PC Image Editor. So it may work for you. Let us know in the comments below if this is a problem you encounter.

These days, with ready access to image editors, there is no excuse for bad photos. If you find that your images need a bit of jazzing up,PC Image Editor offers a basic selection of  editing tools that provide the most-used features of more expensive applications. Although it’s not the best image editing program ever, it’s worth a try if you need a few basic tweaks.

Note: The Download button on the Product Information page will download the software to your system.

Expatriate Scotsman now living in Wurzburg, Germany, freelance writer, frustrated future bestselling author, obsessed bibliophile. Other interests include trying to understand The Architect in the Matrix movies, decrypting codes and ciphers, and trying to persuade my landlord and my wife to let me have a Highland Cow for a pet.
More by Mark O'Neill

View the original article here

Taking Photos of Firefighters, Moving the Flash Off-Camera, Resizing vs. Cropping

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Have a question about digital photography? Send it to me. I reply to as many as I can--though given the quantity of e-mails that I get, I can't promise a personal reply to each one. I round up the most interesting questions about once a month here in Digital Focus.

For more frequently asked questions, read my newsletters from January, February, and March.

I take photos of firefighters, which during the day is not a problem. But at night, the reflective strips on their uniforms reflect my flash, and resulting glare takes over the photo, ruining the shots. I have tried using a diffuser, but I still end up with the same mess. Is there some way around this?
--Karen Moran, Trafalgar, Indiana

I have a couple of suggestions, Karen. Your reflection problem stems from the fact that you're using an on-camera flash. It's similar to the red eye effect: The light from your flash hits the reflectors then bounces straight back at the camera, which causes the ugly glare you get in your photos. A diffuser won't solve the problem, since the light source is still very close to the lens. Consequently, the solution is to move or eliminate the flash.

If there's enough ambient light where you're shooting, try to turn off the flash and shoot using a very high ISO setting. Another approach is to move the light source off the camera so the light won't reflect right back into the lens. If you can mount your flash externally, such as on a handheld flash bracket, that might do the trick. You can get an inexpensive cable to connect the flash to the camera.

Can you tell me where I can find an off-camera TTL flash cord that will work with the new Fuji X PRO 1?
--Ed Dickau, Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania

What a coincidence! This is exactly what Karen needs for her firefighter photos, Ed.

TTL flash cords--cables that connect your flash to your digital SLR or advanced point-and-shoot via the hot shoe--are fairly universal. Generally, TTL cables work with Canon, Fuji, Nikon, and Pentax cameras, to name but a few. So you can search for "TTL flash cable" in your browser and find a lot of options. For example, I found a TTL flash cable with a generous 30-foot cord for about $50 on Amazon.com.

I recently tried to resize a photo using my photo editor's Crop tool, but it didn't appear to change the dimensions of the photo to what I wanted. How do you resize a photo when you crop?
--Joseph Conrad, via the Internet

You've stumbled upon something that confuses a lot of people. Your photo editor's crop tool doesn't actually resize photos, even when you choose a preset dimension like 4 by 6 inches. Cropping lets you cut away the parts of the photo you don't want while you trim the photo to a new aspect ratio. This is handy because digital cameras don't take pictures in standard frame-ready proportions like 4-by-6 or 5-by-7 inches.

To actually reduce a photo to a specific pixel size, you need to use the resize tool. Take Adobe Photoshop Elements, for example. Start by using the Crop tool to recompose your photo and set the photo to the desired aspect ratio. Then choose Image, Size, Resize and dial in the exact number of pixels you want.

I recently took some great photos of my granddaughter, but deleted them from my camera's memory card by mistake. Is there any way to get them back?
--Cecilia Kane, Greensboro, North Carolina

All hope isn't lost, Cecilia. And don't feel too bad--I get this question more frequently than you might think.

There are a lot of data recovery programs available for download on the Internet, but it's getting very hard to find free ones that actually work as advertised. Consequently, these days I suggest you put your faith in either PhotoRescue Wizard or Digital Photo Recovery, both of which cost $25 and do a good job of finding deleted photos--as long as you haven't used the memory card very much since the accidental deletion.

If the photos are missing, not because of a slip of a finger on the Delete button, but because the memory card is corrupted, then I suggest you give CnW Recovery Software a try. You can try this program in demo mode for free to see if it can find your lost photos, then get a 30-day license for $20, which is handy for a one-time emergency. Last year I took a video of my daughter's performance in a school play, and due to a weird glitch my camera didn't save the file properly when I stopped recording. I successfully used CnW Recovery to get the video back in its entirety.

It's not always convenient for me to transfer photos using a memory card. Sometimes I want to send a picture via email. Given any particular JPEG, will there be any difference in quality between using a memory card or emailing the picture?
--John Walker, Kissimmee, Florida

That depends, John. If you manually add a photo to an email as an attachment (such as using the Attachment button in Gmail or dragging photos into a mail message in Microsoft Outlook) then the photo will arrive at its destination identical to the way it left your PC.

But that's not always the case. For example, if you right-click a photo in Windows and choose Send to… Mail Recipient, Windows will offer to compress the photo for you. If you choose any option other than Original Size, the photo will be smaller and compressed differently, so there will be an obvious quality difference.

Also, I should also point out that if you use Apple iTunes to copy photos to your new iPad, you might also run into some unexpected quality changes. This surprising result was uncovered by my PCWorld colleague Melissa Perenson. Based on my own experiments, I agree that iTunes appears to slightly increase color saturation and resave JPEGs at a lower quality level, which results in some loss of color detail and image quality.

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique.

Great news! For a limited time (from March 1 till August 31, 2012), Hot Pic of the Week winners will receive one free downloadable copy of Corel PaintShop Pro X4.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 800 by 600 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This week's Hot Pic: "Canada Goose on Ice" by Eric Hoar, Springvale, Maine

Eric says: "This image of a Canada Goose hanging out on a patch of ice in the Mousam River in Sanford, Maine, is actually a panorama. I made it by combining two photos."

Eric shot this with his Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS8.

This week's runner-up: "APBA Race" by Ron Knapik, Amsterdam, New York

Ron says he shot this on film using a Canon SLR, and scanned the resulting photo. He shot it from a patrol boat on the Mohawk River in Alplaus, New York.

To see last month's winners, visit our March Hot Pics slide show. Visit the Hot Pics Flickr gallery to browse past winners.

Have a digital photo question? E-mail me your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself. And be sure to sign up to have Digital Focus e-mailed to you each week.

View the original article here

Make fast work of finding photos with Lost Photos

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

We used to dig through drawers and shoeboxes to find old photos. But now we dig through digital archives, like email accounts. Lost Photos (free for Windows, $3 for Mac) is a handy application that makes dusting off your snapshots a breeze.

Lost Photos makes it easy to find photos buried in the depths of your email account.To use it, you simply install it, enter your email address and password, and let it go to work. Lost Photos can scan AOL, Gmail, Google Apps, iCloud/MobileMe, and Yahoo email accounts for—you guessed it—lost photos.

It sifts through all of the messages in your account, looking for any images. You can set it to ignore images received before a certain date, or images that are smaller than 8k in size (which are more likely to be logos and icons than actual photographs). You also can have it ignore GIFs, which may be animations rather than photos.

That's all you have to do: Lost Photos does the rest, locating the images and saving them to your hard drive.

Unfortunately, it saves them to a folder it creates on your C: drive, rather than letting you select the location or create a new folder for this purpose. And the application is subject to the bandwidth limits of your email provider: After locating almost 2,000 folders in my Gmail account in just a few hours, Lost Photos suggested that I pause it for 24 hours, so as not to cause any problems with my email provider's own limitations. This is only a suggestion, though, and you can choose to dismiss it if you're throwing caution to the wind.

Once your photos are located, you can browse them within Lost Photo's excellent interface. The application is streamlined and attractive, making it easy to use. You can browse through thumbnails, and can click on one to see a larger version of the photo. From here, you can post it to Facebook or Twitter, or share it via email. And once the photos are downloaded to your hard drive, you're free to do with them as you please.

Lost Photos isn't just a fun application, it's pretty useful, too.

—Liane Cassavoy

View the original article here

Make fast work of finding photos with Lost Photos

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

We used to dig through drawers and shoeboxes to find old photos. But now we dig through digital archives, like email accounts. Lost Photos (free for Windows, $3 for Mac) is a handy application that makes dusting off your snapshots a breeze.

Lost Photos makes it easy to find photos buried in the depths of your email account.To use it, you simply install it, enter your email address and password, and let it go to work. Lost Photos can scan AOL, Gmail, Google Apps, iCloud/MobileMe, and Yahoo email accounts for—you guessed it—lost photos.

It sifts through all of the messages in your account, looking for any images. You can set it to ignore images received before a certain date, or images that are smaller than 8k in size (which are more likely to be logos and icons than actual photographs). You also can have it ignore GIFs, which may be animations rather than photos.

That's all you have to do: Lost Photos does the rest, locating the images and saving them to your hard drive.

Unfortunately, it saves them to a folder it creates on your C: drive, rather than letting you select the location or create a new folder for this purpose. And the application is subject to the bandwidth limits of your email provider: After locating almost 2,000 folders in my Gmail account in just a few hours, Lost Photos suggested that I pause it for 24 hours, so as not to cause any problems with my email provider's own limitations. This is only a suggestion, though, and you can choose to dismiss it if you're throwing caution to the wind.

Once your photos are located, you can browse them within Lost Photo's excellent interface. The application is streamlined and attractive, making it easy to use. You can browse through thumbnails, and can click on one to see a larger version of the photo. From here, you can post it to Facebook or Twitter, or share it via email. And once the photos are downloaded to your hard drive, you're free to do with them as you please.

Lost Photos isn't just a fun application, it's pretty useful, too.

—Liane Cassavoy

View the original article here

Taking Photos of Firefighters, Moving the Flash Off-Camera, Resizing vs. Cropping

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

Have a question about digital photography? Send it to me. I reply to as many as I can--though given the quantity of e-mails that I get, I can't promise a personal reply to each one. I round up the most interesting questions about once a month here in Digital Focus.

For more frequently asked questions, read my newsletters from January, February, and March.

I take photos of firefighters, which during the day is not a problem. But at night, the reflective strips on their uniforms reflect my flash, and resulting glare takes over the photo, ruining the shots. I have tried using a diffuser, but I still end up with the same mess. Is there some way around this?
--Karen Moran, Trafalgar, Indiana

I have a couple of suggestions, Karen. Your reflection problem stems from the fact that you're using an on-camera flash. It's similar to the red eye effect: The light from your flash hits the reflectors then bounces straight back at the camera, which causes the ugly glare you get in your photos. A diffuser won't solve the problem, since the light source is still very close to the lens. Consequently, the solution is to move or eliminate the flash.

If there's enough ambient light where you're shooting, try to turn off the flash and shoot using a very high ISO setting. Another approach is to move the light source off the camera so the light won't reflect right back into the lens. If you can mount your flash externally, such as on a handheld flash bracket, that might do the trick. You can get an inexpensive cable to connect the flash to the camera.

Can you tell me where I can find an off-camera TTL flash cord that will work with the new Fuji X PRO 1?
--Ed Dickau, Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania

What a coincidence! This is exactly what Karen needs for her firefighter photos, Ed.

TTL flash cords--cables that connect your flash to your digital SLR or advanced point-and-shoot via the hot shoe--are fairly universal. Generally, TTL cables work with Canon, Fuji, Nikon, and Pentax cameras, to name but a few. So you can search for "TTL flash cable" in your browser and find a lot of options. For example, I found a TTL flash cable with a generous 30-foot cord for about $50 on Amazon.com.

I recently tried to resize a photo using my photo editor's Crop tool, but it didn't appear to change the dimensions of the photo to what I wanted. How do you resize a photo when you crop?
--Joseph Conrad, via the Internet

You've stumbled upon something that confuses a lot of people. Your photo editor's crop tool doesn't actually resize photos, even when you choose a preset dimension like 4 by 6 inches. Cropping lets you cut away the parts of the photo you don't want while you trim the photo to a new aspect ratio. This is handy because digital cameras don't take pictures in standard frame-ready proportions like 4-by-6 or 5-by-7 inches.

To actually reduce a photo to a specific pixel size, you need to use the resize tool. Take Adobe Photoshop Elements, for example. Start by using the Crop tool to recompose your photo and set the photo to the desired aspect ratio. Then choose Image, Size, Resize and dial in the exact number of pixels you want.

I recently took some great photos of my granddaughter, but deleted them from my camera's memory card by mistake. Is there any way to get them back?
--Cecilia Kane, Greensboro, North Carolina

All hope isn't lost, Cecilia. And don't feel too bad--I get this question more frequently than you might think.

There are a lot of data recovery programs available for download on the Internet, but it's getting very hard to find free ones that actually work as advertised. Consequently, these days I suggest you put your faith in either PhotoRescue Wizard or Digital Photo Recovery, both of which cost $25 and do a good job of finding deleted photos--as long as you haven't used the memory card very much since the accidental deletion.

If the photos are missing, not because of a slip of a finger on the Delete button, but because the memory card is corrupted, then I suggest you give CnW Recovery Software a try. You can try this program in demo mode for free to see if it can find your lost photos, then get a 30-day license for $20, which is handy for a one-time emergency. Last year I took a video of my daughter's performance in a school play, and due to a weird glitch my camera didn't save the file properly when I stopped recording. I successfully used CnW Recovery to get the video back in its entirety.

It's not always convenient for me to transfer photos using a memory card. Sometimes I want to send a picture via email. Given any particular JPEG, will there be any difference in quality between using a memory card or emailing the picture?
--John Walker, Kissimmee, Florida

That depends, John. If you manually add a photo to an email as an attachment (such as using the Attachment button in Gmail or dragging photos into a mail message in Microsoft Outlook) then the photo will arrive at its destination identical to the way it left your PC.

But that's not always the case. For example, if you right-click a photo in Windows and choose Send to… Mail Recipient, Windows will offer to compress the photo for you. If you choose any option other than Original Size, the photo will be smaller and compressed differently, so there will be an obvious quality difference.

Also, I should also point out that if you use Apple iTunes to copy photos to your new iPad, you might also run into some unexpected quality changes. This surprising result was uncovered by my PCWorld colleague Melissa Perenson. Based on my own experiments, I agree that iTunes appears to slightly increase color saturation and resave JPEGs at a lower quality level, which results in some loss of color detail and image quality.

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique.

Great news! For a limited time (from March 1 till August 31, 2012), Hot Pic of the Week winners will receive one free downloadable copy of Corel PaintShop Pro X4.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 800 by 600 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.

This week's Hot Pic: "Canada Goose on Ice" by Eric Hoar, Springvale, Maine

Eric says: "This image of a Canada Goose hanging out on a patch of ice in the Mousam River in Sanford, Maine, is actually a panorama. I made it by combining two photos."

Eric shot this with his Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS8.

This week's runner-up: "APBA Race" by Ron Knapik, Amsterdam, New York

Ron says he shot this on film using a Canon SLR, and scanned the resulting photo. He shot it from a patrol boat on the Mohawk River in Alplaus, New York.

To see last month's winners, visit our March Hot Pics slide show. Visit the Hot Pics Flickr gallery to browse past winners.

Have a digital photo question? E-mail me your comments, questions, and suggestions about the newsletter itself. And be sure to sign up to have Digital Focus e-mailed to you each week.

View the original article here

Webinar: Working with photos in Office

The webinar is over. The video is coming soon. Connect from the series, please visit http://aka.ms/offweb more information.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, you would get the details better law. This week Webinar we explain the tools in PowerPoint, Word, and Outlook, which make an image look good.

What do you learn at Tuesday's webinar

Pictures see a bad image GoodWrapping inserting and customizing an ImageMake new TextA tool for PowerPoint 2013

References for this webinar

--Doug Thomas

View the original article here

Use five simple ways to make picture effects, save photos to Ho-Hum

Error in deserializing body of reply message for operation 'Translate'. The maximum string content length quota (8192) has been exceeded while reading XML data. This quota may be increased by changing the MaxStringContentLength property on the XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas object used when creating the XML reader. Line 1, position 9263.
Error in deserializing body of reply message for operation 'Translate'. The maximum string content length quota (8192) has been exceeded while reading XML data. This quota may be increased by changing the MaxStringContentLength property on the XmlDictionaryReaderQuotas object used when creating the XML reader. Line 1, position 9572.

(Guest blogger Cynthia Hartwig, co-owner of Two Pens, teaches business people how to write social media content from both sides of the brain. Follow @twopens2 or the Two Pens blog at http://www.twopens.com.)

Have you ever skipped a meeting and then gotten nominated to take on a task because you weren't there to defend yourself?

Yep. My rowing club asked me to create a club calendar "with my great photos."

Problem is, while I'm great at words, I'm an amateur photographer, at best. I like snapping photos but I miss more than I hit.

 So imagine my delight when I discovered Picture Tools in Word 2010 which helped me make-over my images. To start glitzing them up, I just selected each one in turn so as to display the Picture Tools Format tab on the Ribbon.

  

Then I got to work. If you're less than a photo pro, like me, you can use these five easy tips for changing a snapshop into something snappier.

Take a look at the "before" shot of me and my Conibear Rowing Club pals "tying-in" to our quad before practice. It's a sweet, smiley shot but it's like 9 million other shots taken in the flat light of gray Seattle. Dull.

  

Before:  Cynthia Hartwig (front) and other Conibear Rowing Club masters tie-in to a quad on a gray Seattle day. Light is flat.

After inserting the photo into my document, I went to the Ribbon and selected Picture Tools, then I chose Color to brighten my shot. Word gave me lots of options for increasing color saturation. After clicking and evaluating several saturation choices, I ended up picking a thumbnail with 100% saturation This gave my photo a nice warm pop; options beyond 100% made us look like we were rowing to Disneyland instead of Lake Washington (a clue to back off on color adjustment!).

The last step was to go back to Picture Tools and select a middle range of Brightness and Contrast in Corrections. To do this, I chose Picture Correction Options and used my mouse to slide the cursor to the correction I wanted. Live Preview helped me choose the setting that made the blacks look really black.

 

 

 After:  I counteracted the gray light by increasing Color saturation. Now the photo pops.

Here's a snapshot I took of one of our rowing shells powering up in practice. It's a bland shot. Not much to recommend it because of its busy composition and so-so-lighting. But if you look closer at the rowers, the shot does have some nice drama. Three rowers in this boat shell are pulling all out and their oars are making a nice backsplash.

Before:  Your eye doesn't know whether to look at the rowers or the boat behind them.

I chose the Crop tool and cut out all the other extraneous (and distracting) information. Your eye knows where to look with this crop and you get the excitement of the moment with the expressions and the splash. Then I did the same thing I did above: I went into Picture Tools, chose Color and increased the color saturation slightly for some zing.

 

After:  I cropped in on three rowers with the most action and splash. Now you know where to look.

In late January, we Conibears celebrate our achievements at an annual award party. I like this silly snapshot demonstrating a gag idea for lighting up our boats on dark Seattle mornings. One club member wears a full yellow body suit lit with Christmas tree lights; another holds up the white option. The original photo was dark because it was taken inside at night.

  

Before:  This shot of a gag skit at the rowers' awards party was taken indoors. It's dark and dreary.  

Highlighting the Christmas tree lights seemed like a good way to show off the idea of the photo, so I went to Picture Tools and chose Corrections. Then I increased the contrast by selecting a thumbnail in Brighten and Contrast. I felt that the faces and room could reasonably go dark because there's enough detail in the photo to show you the scene. By increasing the brightness, I was able to give the Christmas tree lights a bright glow that enhances the idea of the photo. As a last step, I also chose a thumbnail under Corrections and chose Sharpen and Soften to give the photo better detail.

 

After:  I bumped the Contrast up to make the lights the brightest element in the shot. Now the gag idea of "lighting up the dark" works.

Conibear Rowing Club raises money every year for Rainier Valley Rowers (RVR), a nonprofit organization which provides scholarships to kids of all income level to learn to row. I wanted to emphasize the diversity of RVR rowers so I spent time in Picture Tools trying out a wide range of color effects. I went into Tone in the Color section, and picked the thumbnail that gave me the best balance of skin tones of the Asian, Hispanic, African-American, Caucasian and Eritrean kids in the boat. I made sure to pick the tone that also kept the warm reds and yellows of the fall leaves in the background. Voila: instant United Nations.

 

 Before:  The Rainier Valley Rowers look slightly washed out and the colors fall in the cool, blue tones.

After:  To warm up the photo and emphasize the full range of skin tones, I used the Tone selection in Word 2010 Picture Tools. This helped bring out the fall leaves in the background.

Conibear Rowers don't wear elk horns or buffalo heads but we do initiate our new officers with the ritual of "crossing under the oars." I snapped this photo at the awards ceremony and had a problem with the indoor lighting and outside darkness. Consequently, the photo came out soft, a little blurry and full of noise. Rather than fighting the noise, I decided to increase it for a grainy effect by increasing in Brightness and Contrast under Color Corrections. I also upped the Color Saturation by picking a thumbnail that looked good. To counteract the lack of detail and blur, I adjusted the image (by 50%) using Sharpen under Corrections so the facial expressions were distinct.

After:  The dark shot taken at the initiation of the club officers was blurry so I sharpened it.

Not bad for "word" processing software! Now if only Word 2010 could represent me at the next Conibear Club meeting before I get "volunteered" to redo our website. :-)

-- Cynthia Hartwig is co-owner of Two Pens, which teaches business people how to write social media content from both sides of the brain. @twopens2

View the original article here

Learn Photoshop now - Straighten Crooked Photos using the measurement tool

I found the best way to straighten images in Photoshop is to use the measure tool, which fortunately takes all the guess of the process work. As you'll see in a moment, as long as you have something of the photo that should be straight, Photoshop almost all of the work do for us! Measurement tool is hidden behind the eyedropper tool in the tool palette, and you have to click and hold down your mouse button on the eyedropper tool for a second or two. One of fly-out menu appears and tells you other tools hiding behind it. Click to select the measure tool.

First of all, you want to get something in your picture that should be straight, horizontally or vertically. Then, you want to drag along its border with the measurement tool so Photoshop has something to work with when trying to calculate warped how the photo actually is. In this case, I click and drag horizontally along the roof of the building behind the freedom of Mrs. Clearly the roof should be completely level, but is obviously not at the moment. I can simply click once on the left side of the roof and now my mouse button pressed, drag on the right side of the roof. Photoshop uses the angle of the line that we just created to discover how the image should be rotated to correct it.

So, basically, to straighten something all you need to do is click and drag with measure tool along the edge of something in the photo that should be straight horizontally or vertically. You can search in the Options bar at the top of the screen and see the angle of the line you just drew (this is the number listed on the right of the letter "A"). In my case, we can see that my line is on a 1.9 degree angle:

The Options bar should be showing the angle of the line that you drew with the measurement tool. Photoshop now uses this light to know how much to turn the image to correct it. To find the command "Turn canvas - arbitrary" click on the Image menu at the top of the program, choose canvas rotation, and then select arbitrary:

Go to Image > rotate canvas > arbitrary. I have to laugh whenever I do that, because the word "arbitrary" actually means at random or by chance, but this is exactly the opposite of what we do here. We will not for random image rotation or nothing left to chance. We used the tool to find exactly how a corner our image should be rotated by, and now Photoshop may use the information we have given to straighten our image without any guess work. As I have already said, a large part of the problem with Photoshop learning comes to move to the terminology, and in this case, I do not know what thought Adobe.

However, life continues. Once you choose "Arbitrary", Photoshop opens the dialog of canvas to rotate, and as we can see, all the work has already been done for us. In my case, Photoshop is already entered in a 1.85 for the Angle option value, and he even recognized that the image must be rotated counter-clockwise, CCW option is also selected:

Photoshop tutorials: The "rotate canvas" dialog box with the angle and the direction already selected for us. You may wonder why Photoshop is entered an angle of 1.85 when the Options bar showed an angle of 1.9 a moment ago. The reason is that Photoshop rounds off the corners in the Options bar to 1 decimal place, so he showed same 1.9 If the angle of the line we drew with measurement tool was actually 1.85. The angle indicated in the Rotate Canvas dialog box is the correct angle.

Everything we need to do is click on the OK button in the Web dialog box rotate output and have Photoshop rotate and straighten picture for us. You should see that the image is now properly rotated and straightened. Everything seems great, and fortunately that the Statue of liberty is based is no longer on the right. We adjusted the image without any work of guess with measure tool and the canvas to rotate command.

You will notice that there is a minor problem. When we did turn the image in the document window, we have created some blank areas of white cloth outside the photo. We will want to finish things off the coast by removing these areas using Photoshop crop tool. You can select the crop tool in the tool palette, or simply press the letter c on your keyboard to select with the shortcut:

Using the crop tool click on close to the upper left of your image and made dragging downward, downward to the right to create a border around the area of the image that you want to keep. You can refine your selection by dragging one of the handles of angle or by dragging the top, bottom, left or right sides of the selection:

Use the crop tool to drag a selection around the part of the image that you want to keep. Once you've dragged your cropping border, press enter (Win) / return (Mac) to have Photoshop crops the image.

You liked this article? Curious whether learning photoshop quick? Well now, you can get this free report ... .What are waiting you for?