Straighten Your Crooked Pictures

Use your image editor to repair off-kilter photos.

Dave Johnson

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Feature: Straighten Your Crooked Pictures

Why is it that a picture looks perfectly straight in the viewfinder when you photograph it, but by the time it makes its way onto your PC, it's tilted like a sinking ship?

The answer is simple: The scene in your viewfinder is as level as the world around you, and your brain ignores the fact that the camera itself is slightly off-kilter when you frame the shot. So, as usual, it's your brain's fault.

But just because you take the occasional crooked picture, that doesn't mean you have to live with it. This week, let's look at straightening pictures in some detail. This is somewhat similar to correcting perspective in photos. I've written about this before, in "Fix Perspective in Your Photos" and "Fix Perspective in Architectural Photos."

But so far, I've never covered plain old straightening. Nor have I touched on some of the problems that come from this type of correction. For example, straightening an image can leave blank spots in the corners of a picture. This week we'll learn how judicious use of the Clone Brush can remedy these defects.

Use the Straighten Tool

In the old days, image editing software didn't come with an easy way to straighten photos; you had to rotate the picture, a little at a time, until it looked about right. Our tools have evolved, making the task far easier. I'll use Jasc Paint Shop Pro to demonstrate my point.

Let's work on a picture of a windmill that I took a while ago. The windmill's tilt is not severe, but the lean to the right is just enough to spoil an otherwise good photo. Save the shot to your hard drive so that you can open it up and work along with me.

Start the correction by selecting the Straighten tool from the second cubby in the toolbar on the left side of the screen. You'll see a horizontal line appear across the picture. Position the line with your mouse over something in the picture that's supposed to be perfectly vertical or horizontal. Simply grab its endpoints and move them to where you want them. This sample picture offers a nice, straight windmill shaft that should be vertical, so I centered the line right over it.

When the line is arranged just the way you like, click the check mark in the Tool Options palette at the top of the screen. If the Tool Options palette isn't already on screen, display it by choosing View, Palettes, Tool Options.

Presto--the windmill is straight.

Clone Away the Emptiness

Unfortunately, by fixing one problem we've created another. By rotating the picture, we've introduced empty space along the edges; you'll probably want to get rid of it.

If you don't mind making the picture smaller and changing the composition slightly, the fix is a snap: Just crop the picture, being careful to eliminate the empty space in the process.

But you can be more creative than that: Try filling in the voids using the Clone Brush. This works great when you have a simple, indistinct background--as in this week's sample picture.

Click the Clone Brush (it's in the eighth cubby in the toolbar) and then, in the Tool Options palette, set the size of the brush to about 40 pixels. You should adjust the size up or down if you're editing pictures that are much larger or smaller than the one we're working with this week. Make sure that the Opacity is set at 100 percent, and you're ready to go.

Now right-click in the sky very near the empty space, but low enough that the entire Clone Brush diameter is in the blue, and paint across the space. You may need to do a bit of "scrubbing" back and forth to get the color consistent, and you may have to sample different bits of the sky to fully and seamlessly cover the empty area.

Repeat the process to paint down the left side. When you reach the clouds, stop and sample a spot in the middle of the thick, bushy clouds near the mountains, then resume painting. When you reach the mountain itself, right-click precisely on the top edge of the mountain, move the brush to the blank space, and paint. The new, cloned mountain should line up with the real mountain perfectly. Finish the cloning in this way.

When you're all done, save the picture.

Dave's Favorites: Improve Camera Phone Pics With Mobile Photo Enhancer

Camera phones are all the rage these days. And they can be very useful, whether it's to take a photo of that broken parking meter that got you unjustly ticketed or to capture an impromptu shot of your 5-year-old waving good-bye for her first day at school.

Handy as camera phones are, however, the quality of their pictures can be abysmal. Sure, I imagine that in a couple of years, higher-quality many-megapixel camera phones with really usable flash functions may be standard. And in occasional flights of fancy, I even dream of a day that they could largely replace stand-alone digital cameras. But for the moment, most camera phones in the U.S. are the photographic equivalent of a Close 'n Play Phonograph.

So is there any way to improve the quality of the pictures that your camera phone spits out? Absolutely! I've had good results with Mobile Photo Enhancer, a small and simple utility from VicMan Software.

Mobile Photo Enhancer couldn't be much simpler. Just load a picture (you'll probably have to e-mail the photo to your PC from your phone), and the program automatically reduces digital noise and performs an automatic color enhancement. You can fine-tune the amount of correction and also make some other simple fixes, such as brightening the corners of the photo; often, camera phones do a poor job of illuminating corners. You can even batch-edit several pictures at once.

The only downside is Mobile Photo Enhancer's price. It costs $30, which, in my opinion, is simply too much money for a one-trick pony like this--unless you take a lot of camera phone pictures and plan to use the program frequently. To help you decide, there's a free trial version at VicMan's site.

Q&A: Improve Frames Grabbed From Video

I have some analog video that I captured with Pinnacle's Studio Version 9. I have tried making stills with the "frame grabber" feature, but they always come out too fuzzy. What is the best way to enhance this type of photo?

--Mike Wilsoner, Saluda, North Carolina

I have some bad news for you, Mike. Analog video--the stuff of VHS and 8mm camcorders--is of inherently low quality. The resolution of such video is a little more than 600 by 240 pixels, and the high-fidelity equivalent (like S-VHS and Hi8) is just 600 by 480 pixels.

That isn't the whole story: Analog video has very poor color fidelity, with colors bleeding into others in a very haphazard way, which makes the apparent resolution seem even lower.

So when you grab a still frame from video and turn it into a digital photo, you've got an image that's about the same overall quality as something you'd get from a camera phone. I'm not aware of any filters or software designed specifically to improve analog video images, but you might try running your pictures through software designed to tweak camera phone pictures, like this week's Favorite, VicMan Mobile Photo Enhancer.

But the bottom line is that the quality is so poor to begin with, I wouldn't expect much of an improvement.

Hot Pic of the Week

Get published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.

Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 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: "Flower Bubbles," by Loren Lewis, Vernon, Connecticut

About this week's winning photo, Loren says: "I cut away one side of a cardboard box and lined the inside with aluminum foil to reflect the normal daylight that entered from the open side. Next, I placed a blue terrycloth towel on the bottom of the box and an artificial flower on the towel. I then took a piece of glass from an old picture frame and placed it on top of the box. I placed drops of water on the glass. Using a tripod, I placed the camera over the glass and focused on the drops."