How to straighten photographs of artworks using Photoshop CS2

So you’ve taken photos of your artwork, and instead of doing it properly…… you had to lean it up against something and now it’s not quite straight.  Worse yet, the artwork is in some far off land (or better on Charles Saatchi’s wall), and you cannot reshoot the photograph.  Even worse, to get the image to look straight you will need to crop half of it out, which is not ideal.

Have no fear, it can be rectified in a jiffy.

I should say 2 things about this article.  This is about fixing wonky photographs of artworks (ie it’s for artists) not about fixing wonky horizon lines in photographs.  Second, I’m using Photoshop CS2, I’m sure the latest versions of Photoshop has another even quicker and fancier way of doing this.

1.  Open the recalcitrant image in Photoshop

2.  From the toolbox select the Crop tool (see image below circled red)

3.  Draw a marquee around your image (it will still look crooked), reasonably close to the edges of the image (see below).   Look at the toolbar, and ensure that Perspective is checked.

4.  Then, hover your mouse over one of the corners (you will see there’s a small square on each corner of the marquee).  You will be able to click the square and drag the marquee to the corner edge of the painting. (see images below where I’ve indicated dragging the top and bottom left of the marquee to the edge of the painting).

5.Repeat this for each of the corners

6. Then press enter…

You image will be cropped and hopefully a lot straighter than it was before….