How To Straighten An Image In Lightroom Using Upright

In this video, learn how to straighten photos in lightroom using the guided upright tool. Learn how to fix perspective and straighten a photo. Straighten buildings and landscape photos in lightroom.So have you ever taken a really nice photo, but you look at it, and it looks kinda crooked? Well in this article, we’re gonna straighten things out using this tool,

the guided upright tool, in Adobe Lightroom Classic. Before we start, it’s good practice to come over here to the lens correction tab and enable profile corrections. That way we take care of any issue with the lens and any kind of distortion that could be created just by making that selection. The guided upright tool is straightforward to use. Just choose a line you wish to adjust. Then use your mouse to define the line for Lightroom. Once two lines have been selected, Lightroom will automatically adjust your image based on your guidelines.

So we’ll just click here on upright, and draw a line on the left side of this tower, right along the line that needs to be straightened. You need two lines in order for this to work, so we’ll choose the other side of the tower, and let go, and it straightened it. You can draw a horizontal line also, and there was a little bit of change there,

but now notice right here where this hand little cursor is actually turned into a hand, and that point there you can move your adjustment any way you want and it will change, so I just exaggerated that, but you get the idea. So anywhere there’s a little hand that shows up, that’s a point where you can actually move your line, whether it’s horizontal or vertical, and you can go over here to click on the off to disable the correction, and click back on guided, and that brings it back in. So there are five upright options available in the transform panel. We just went over the guided option. Auto lets Lightroom make all the adjustments for you, but the problem with auto is it doesn’t always do a good job. If the adjustment is straightforward, like straightening a horizon, then auto works well. Vertical tool automatically analyzes and adjusts the vertical lines. This type of adjustment is particularly useful if you’re trying to fix a leaning building or leaning tree. The level tool automatically adjusts your horizontal lines. This tool seems to work well for most landscape shots. And the full adjustment takes into account all vertical and horizontal lines, plus the features of the auto option. Sometimes you might have a photo like this where you can come to the transform panel and maybe just make one adjustment, and be done quickly. So for instance, here let’s click on the auto, and it did a pretty good job of straightening out this whole image, both vertical and horizontal. Now that doesn’t always happen, but we can go through some of these other options to see how they affect the photo. But in this case, auto worked well. At first glance too, this may have looked like a level adjustment may have worked. If I click level, and it doesn’t do too much. It just slightly changed the bottom part of the photo. Uh, let’s try vertical. Not quite. You see these lines on the side here. That didn’t work. Let’s try full. That didn’t work either. The auto mode worked best. If you like this photo the way it looks, you can come up here to the crop tool, right-click and turn off constrain aspect ratio, and move the crop handles any way you want. You can bring it in and take that crop also, so that’s just a way of accepting the use of the upright modes and then using the crop tool to get rid of those white edges we saw on the side. And just to show you what the guided tool would do with this, I’m going to choose the side of that building for my first line, and this side of the top of that building for my second line, and yes, it straightened it like some of the other modes, but in this case, the guided tool didn’t do a good job. In the transform panel, you have all these sliders here, and sometimes you can use that with the guided tool, you can use them together, and that may be necessary, so let’s go through some of those sliders to see what they do. So vertical, obviously, it’s tilting, double-click on the adjustment and it takes it back to zero. Horizontal, you could see that it’s shifting it around. Rotate twist image on an axis point. Aspect will stretch the image. You can see it’s making it wider and narrower. Scale, that’s one way to get rid of those lines on the side, but then it brings it up like this. You could scale the image and offset X. You can move it left and right. Offset Y is up and down. So these sliders would help in addition to using any of the five upright modes to refine any of your adjustments you’ve already made. Another important tool that you have here at the bottom of the transport panel is a constrain crop. So if I have this checked and I click on vertical, it keeps the crop instead of when we originally did it with vertical, it left those wide spaces on the side, so any adjustment that you make up here with these upright modes, when you have the constraint on, you’re gonna get a result you may or may not want. If I click on constrain crop and click on full, you can see now that it looks better, but you’ve lost a lot of the bottom of the art on this wall here.

Here’s another photo, and as you can see, photo is kind of crooked, the buildings, the church, the building on the left, the light post, so let’s use the guided upright tool, and I’m going to click and drag along the side of the church right here, and just to show you you could pick other points, I’m going to click and drag down this light post, and so that did a pretty good job. All the buildings, the light post, the church tower, are all straight. In combination with this, we can use one of the sliders on this transform area here, so now we can come over here and use the scale, get rid of those white areas on the bottom of the photo, bring it in a little bit, and that’s not too bad.

We didn’t lose too much of the photo when we straightened everything out. That’s an example of combining the guided upright tool and some of these transform sliders. Using the guided upright tool is pretty straightforward. You can use it in combination with the other transform sliders, or you can use any of the other upright modes to straighten your image.