You all seen the photos where everything looks like it is falling. Perceptive distortion is one of the most common problems in photos and there are multiple ways to remove it. So today I will show you one simple way in Photoshop.

How to avoid perspective distortion

But before I start, here is how you can avoid it. Perspective distortion appears when your camera is not perfectly leveled. It not only has to be leveled from left to right, but also from front to back. If you have this, your photos will have absolutely no perspective distortion in them.
Some of the newer cameras have a leveling function directly in them, and you just have to turn it on so you see if your camera is leveled correctly. If you don’t have this function, get yourself a 3-axis bubble level for the flash hot-shoe and use that.

Correcting perspective distortion in Photoshop

Let’s look at one of my recent photos. This is from the New years fireworks. I wanted to catch the whole explosion, but as I was standing quite close I could not have the camera leveled and still get it. So I ended up with this distorted image. So the steps to correct this were:

1. Loaded image into Photoshop
2. Unlocked the background layer, so I can edit it. Just double click on the layer, and in the pop-up choose OK. You can also create a duplicate layer instead.

1. starting photo

2. unlock layer

3. Hit Ctrl+T to enter Free transform. When the selection appears, right click inside it and choose Perspective.
4. Now to correct the distortion, you have to drag one of the top corners to the side, until the vertical lines are at 90 degree angle to the horizon.

3. enter free transform

4. change perspective

5. You can see that with this correction, everything looks a bit squished and strange. So this still has to be corrected. So right click again inside the selection and choose Scale.
6. Now we can again scale the image, so by dragging the top center point we can stretch the image up, until it looks good. On some images this can be also the bottom, depends on the content you don’t mind cropping off. Here I cropped of from the sky.

5. change back to scale

6. scale image

7. Once you are done, just hit enter, and you have a corrected image.

This works fine with images with a little distortion, but if you have much more, it will just not look good corrected. It’s just look too stretched afterwards. So think before you take a photo, that you have no or only a little distortion to correct.