Cropping....

I know it's best to crop on horizon for oceans and such, the land can be a different scenario but I have a question about cropping if there is a sign or text in the image.

On one of my rodeo shots, I have a picture of "judges" all up on the wall avoiding a bull - above them is the huge Mareeba Rodeo sign. I was at an angle (not directly in front of them) so when I crop to the grounds horizon, the sign looks crooked. What would be the best option for cropping this? How would you do it?

Here is what I did.... I think it looks a bit funny with the text crooked.

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I'd crop for the ground and leave everything else to fall however it does.

Then again I may crop to show just the girl in the white top above the sign

http://www.photoshopes​sentials.com/photo-editing/keystoning/

You could do all that above, ore just crop for the ground and let everything else be crooked...

Signs are crooked more often than ground is.

Don't know what software you have available, but this was done using Elements 9. A quick filter > camera distortion > horizontal and then a little transform > skew.

Starting with your already cropped version resulted in an awkward crop of the people above the sign; your original may have enough additional real estate to avoid that.

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I have Lightroom and CS5... I did the straightening/cropping in LR. I don't use Photoshop all that much for PP unless I'm doing some manipulations, but colour corrections, cropping, etc is done in LR.

Very interesting thing to know about Photoshop straightening thing. Thanks for that... and the edited image looks good.... Yes, there's more real estate to play with in the original.

I'd say it's all in how you are going to use the image. For photos I go through quickly to put up on the Web and then move on, I'd leave it as it is (ground level). But yeah, I get thrown off by conflicting angles, and if I wanted to get "serious" about an image, I'd resort to the "tools".

Where there are prominent verticals, I always make sure that they are upright as they should always be upright unless you deliberately tilt the camera.

Sorarse wrote in post #12791052
Where there are prominent verticals, I always make sure that they are upright as they should always be upright unless you deliberately tilt the camera.

Excellent point! Going back and looking at the original I think it is the tilted verticals that are more upsetting than the tilted sign. If you get the verticals vertical then the sign is almost horizontal and the whole thing looks quite good. Correcting the vertical can be done right in Lightroom, of course.

However, if you first treat the verticality issue and then do a very slight filter > camera distortion > horizontal (again I'm using Elements) you get everything straight and no need to resort to transforming and skewing at all. (Note that I also corrected a slight amount of barrel distortion at the same time.)

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^ Agree, Straighten the poles.

Ruler/straighten tools in CS5

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The one big flaw in all your changes is losing the face of the girl in the white top. C'mon guys, pay attention!