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.

Few days ago I posted a photo where I created a reflection of a cityscape, and I thought I would show you how one creates one of those (or better said how I do it). I like to keep it simple, and not overdo it. Especially in the scene I used it, night cityscapes, putting too much detail and distortion in the reflection, makes it looking more fake than real.

So I presume that you know at least a little on how to work in Photoshop, and I will do this whole thing in fewer steps, not going the long way around. So lets start (the step number will correspond to the screen-shots in the same order).

1. So let’s start with nice night cityscape, that is perfect for this. You can get the photo from here, if you want to follow along with the steps.
2. Fist step, is to expand the photo so it can accommodate the reflection. To do this, choose the crop tool, and then move your cursor over the small marking in the bottom center of the crop overlay. Your cursor should change into a double-sided arrow. Once there, start dragging the point down, until the center of the crop overlay is on the same line as the horizontal line. Let go, and confirm by pressing Enter.

1. starting photo

2. expand canvas

3. Now we have to copy the cityscape. Choose the Marque tool, and select the part of the photo from top to the horizontal line. Then, while still having the Marque tool selected, right click anywhere inside the selection and from the menu choose layer via copy. This will duplicate this selection into a new layer for you.
4. Select the new layer now and press Ctrl+T (or Edit/Free Transform if you like the slower way of doing things :)). Right click inside the selected area and choose Flip vertical from the context menu. Hit Enter to confirm.

3. create copy

4. flip copy

5. Now choose the move tool, hold down shift (so you move in a straight line) and drag the flipped copy down, until you get it to the bottom border of the image. This will finish the basic reflection.
6. Now to add a little bit of movement into the reflection. As I said before, I don’t like adding too much, just a little blur and motion. So go under Filter/Blur/Motion blur and choose 0 for Angle, and 10-30 pixels for the Distance (around 10 pixels for every 1000 of the photo width). You may need to experiment a little to see what works best for your photo. Click on OK to confirm.

5. move copy

6. create blur

7. To make it a little more interesting, let’s add few small waves to it. To do so, lets first crate a new layer (the second button in the bottom right), fill it with white (simplest way, is to press Shift+Backspace and chose White in the Use selection). Then add noise to this layer, by choosing Filter/Noise/Add Noise. Use 400%, Gaussian and Monochrome.
8. Now lets add some motion blur to this layers. Go under Filter/Blur/Motion blur and choose angle 0 and Distance of about 4 times the one you used before (around 40 in my case)

7. new layer with noise

8. add blur

9. We have to add more contrast to this layer, so only some of the waves are visible. To do so, go under Image/Adjustments/Levels (Ctrl+L for short) and in the levels dialog, push the three sliders around, until you have something similar to my result. All should be close to each other, around the 3/4th of the scale. Confirm this adjustment.
10. Still to make the waves a little better, let’s make the ones closer a little bigger. To do so, with the waves layers selected, press Ctrl+T to go into Free transform again, right click on the selection and choose Perspective. Then grab the bottom right corner of the selection and drag it to the right. This will affect both corners and you get a result as on the screen-shot. Once done, confirm with Enter.

9. add contrast

10. perspective distortion

11. Now to finish, we need the waves to be only on the bottom part of the image. The simples way is to create a clipping mask. To do so, with the waves layer selected, go under Layer/Create clipping mask. The layer will now have the same size as the one under it. Now just change the blending mode to Soft light and the opacity to something around 5-10%, and your done.

And for those who want to see this as video, here it is :)

Feel free to ask if something is not explained enough in this tutorial, and I hope you like it :)

One of the more common problems with landscape photos, is color banding. It’s a very noticeable problem, that can give a photo a very ugly look. But there is actually a quite simple solution to this, to remove it, or at least make it less visible.

What is Color banding?

Each time you have a smooth transition between two colors in a scene, mostly in the blue shades of a sky, it can happen that in a photo of it, you will get these steps where you can see where one color changes into another, instead of a smooth transition.

This is due to a limited number of colors one can save in a photo file. Like this, the nearest available color is used and abrupt changes between shades of the same color are created. So the more colors, the less likely this will happen. If you ever edited a photo in 16bit mode, and then tried to save it as a 8bit file to web, you would find this problem rather often.

Here you have a typical scene for color bending. Even in this corrected version, you still can see a little of it due to the compression.

How to avoid color banding?

• Use bigger color space – The more colors available, the less color banding. This is of course not possible if you share to web, as browsers don’t work correctly with 16-bit files.
• Use smaller compression – The more a photo is compressed, the less colors it uses, the more visible the bending is. Of course if you upload to a service that does it’s own compression (like Facebook), you have very little power over this.
• Avoid noise reduction – Noise reduction is similar to lower quality, where it averages the colors so more banding is introduced.
• Avoid edits – The more filters or adjustments you put on a photo, the more you run into a chance to create more banding. Especially edits that add contrast tend to introduce more color banding.
• Avoid removing lens distortion – Especially in the sky, it can create unwanted color banding.
• Merge first – This is one Photoshop specific. When you put your adjustments into separate layers and then look at a photo, it may look like there is a huge amount of color banding. But this could be misleading. Before you try and correct it, try merging the layers into one (or create new layer from the merge). You will quickly see, that once all the adjustments are applied, the banding becomes much less dominant, or it disappears completely.

How to correct color banding?

So what to do once the banding is there? The solution is to add more variation to the color transition, so forcing the compress algorithm to use more colors and so creating a nicer transition. To do this, one has to add a little noise to the effected areas.

You can use the basic noise filter in Photoshop. Just go under Filter/Noise/Add noise. The settings you need are not always the same, as it depends a lot on the photo, but mine are usually 0.3%, Gaussian and Monochromatic. You can experiment with the strength, to see if you need more or less. I would suggest adding the noise to a new layer, a merged copy of the whole image, and then just masking in the parts where you need it.

Here is an example of a correction like this, before and after adding noise. Please note that even the screen-shots are influenced by image compression so the effect is not 100% as seen here.

No noise added

Noise added

If you have any questions or a great different solution how to remove color banding, feel free to share in the comments.

There are many things one should correct on every photos, and there are some one has to decide for oneself if they need to be corrected or not. And in this post, I will go through them, and give you my thought on what I like to do, and what I think is the best approach.

Chromatic aberration

This one I think that should be always removed. It’s so distracting when you look at a beautiful landscape photo, and then you see this ugly aberration, that just ruins the experience from the photo. And it’s not like it’s hard to remove them. Just one click in Lightroom or Camera Raw. In very rare that you want more chromatic aberrations in a photo, normally only if you are trying to emulate a look of some old camera, but that’s a very special case, as then you are trying to add more mistakes into the photo.

Dust spots

Another thing that should be corrected always (again not taking into account when you are trying to create a vintage, destroyed photo). Leaving dust spots in a photo just makes you seem so lazy. This should be first thing that gets corrected.

Noise

This one is more for a debate. In some photos noise is acceptable, in some it looks so ugly. And in some you have to leave some in to avoid horrible color bending. I think it’s ok in vintage looking shots, and some portrait photos. I don’t like it in landscape and architecture shots. But it’s all to everyones personal preference.

Crooked horizon

It’s a little simpler with a crooked horizon. If it’s a little crocked, correct it. If it crooked a lot, you can keep it. It just look like intention when it’s crooked a lot, and like mistake when it’s crooked a little :)

Vignetting

If you are creating a panorama, you really have to remove vignetting. You just want to get the best blend possible. When doing a single photo, it’s a personal decision if you want to remove vignetting or not. I usually leave it be, and sometimes even make it stronger. Having the corners darker and center brighter will bring more attention to

Perspective distortion

Perspective distortions can add to the photo, but also make it much worse. You all seen the effect of falling vertical lines when you shoot up or down. It is very different for every photo, if it is acceptable or not. The distortion can give a sense of scale and make seem things are huge. For instance if you look at an interior photo of a cathedral, without a perspective distortion it looks small and strange. But on the other hand, cityscape shots from far look really strange with a visible distortion.

Ghosting

With ghosting, it depends on what kind it is. If you got ghosting because you did a long exposure shot, I think that quite alright. If you got ghosting because you blended multiple exposures, you should definitively correct those, either in the software you blended the exposures, or afterwards in Photoshop.

Saturated colors

I tend to go by a rule, that If I want to have a strongly saturated color in a photo, I only have one. And it also can’t cover the whole photo. The reason is that there having both stronger and weaker saturated colors will add a nice color contrast, and also give the viewers eyes a place to rest. There are saturated colors in the world, so there should also be in your photos. Just de-saturating everything is not a good approach.

White balance

The importance of white balance changes greatly on the type of photography you do. In portrait and studio photography, this is very important. In landscape photography one can play with the white balance more, as also the light varies much more. Just by choosing to go differently with it, you can give a completely different feel to a photo.

I thought I will write a guide on how to organize your photos in Lightroom, but as everyone likes something else, I will write more about how I organize mine, which may inspire some of you. So I will go through few points about how I order my photos, to make things easier.

One catalog

I use only one catalog in Lightroom. I thought some time ago to split photos into multiple catalogs, but then I found no good reason for it. Lightroom only allows one to be opened at one time, and I really don’t want to restart it each time I need something from a second one. Also, my catalog is currently over 100 000+ photos big, and the performance is the same as it was 10 000. Lightroom just does not loads closed folder and only time you will get a big slowdown is when it has to create the thumbnails for the first time.

Time and location based structure

I use the default folder structure, based on year and date. After import I also add a location to the folder name, so it’s easier for me to quickly identify what is in a certain folder. To make the number of folders more manageable, I tend to group folders from photos from a single trip.

Never rename files

I never change the default names of files. The files are imported as IMG_xxxx. This is because it makes easier to find a specific raw file for a photo, as I include this name also in the name of the final edit (the posted photos are usually named location-IMG_xxx-web).

Some people tend to rename the files, but that just makes things more messy.

Stars, colors and collections

I use stars to remember what I edited, and what I still plan to edit. Usually I just add 4 stars to photos I already edited, and 5 starts to those I want to edit. No stars are photos, I still a have to think about. If I don’t want to keep the photo, I just delete it (even if I still have to go through a huge number of photos and delete everything I don’t want)

I also have collections created, separate for finished photos and separate to photos I want to edit. This are smart, so once a star rating is added to a photo, it is automatically included in the collection.

Colors I use mostly to mark together huge groups of photos, like HDR panoramas or timelapse sequences. The colors help to distinct them from the surrounding photos.

Finished photos

I never delete the RAW files, as I use them quite often for tutorial and blog posts. I also keep the PSD of the finished photo, and two copies of the jpg version. One is sharpened and resized for web (1350×900 pixel) and one at full size sharpened for print. I don’t import these into Lightroom, as I don’t need them there. I store them in a separate folder and also on Smugmug. Of course the full size files in a hidden folder, just so I have access to them from anywhere.

All these take of course a lot of space, as a single edited photo can take over 1gb of space. Luckilly, the prices of hardrives go down every year, so getting a nice 4tb drive just for photos (or better two, so you also have a backup) is not that pricey anymore.

I could of course make thing more sophisticated, add keywords, filter all photos right as I import them and similar. I just never found the time to do that, even if I tried. And after years, I no longer see the need for that anymore, as all posted photos are in tagged posts on the blog, with keywords and descriptions. It’s just easier to type into a search bar than trying to fill information on thousands of photos.