Perspective Correction Tips

I took this picture with my trusty 17-40L lens at the wide end and fairly close to the building in order to get the whole church into the frame and avoid getting all the ugly power and telephone poles and wires into the shot.

The problem now is that the Church came out badly warped and I have tried my best with Photoshop Elements and another program, Microsoft Digital Image Pro 2006 to remove/correct distortion and just can't seem to come up with something that looks as natural as if I would have shot this with a longer focal length from a greater distance away.

Here's the picture;

Using The Gimp I stretched the perspective along the top wider to left and right, then pulled the right top corner down a bit. Rotated a few degrees anti-clockwise to straighten the horizon, and then reduced the width of the whole image until it seemed to correspond with your original image of the church. Nothing special really... but maybe this not at all what you were looking for? My 2cents.

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Here is my 2 minute attempt. used the crop tool in PS with 'perspective' checked--placed crop where black lines are in upper image.

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Christopher Steven b wrote in post #7938440
Here is my 2 minute attempt. used the crop tool in PS with 'perspective' checked--placed crop where black lines are in upper image.

Wow!

That looks great!

I wonder if I have the "perspective" check box in the crop tool of Photoshop Elements?? I hope so!

Thanks so much for the tip!

Cheers!

The Ghost of FM wrote in post #7938505
Wow!

That looks great!

I wonder if I have the "perspective" check box in the crop tool of Photoshop Elements?? I hope so!

Thanks so much for the tip!

Cheers!

It turns out I don't have that functionality in in PS Elements!

I did find a "free transform option though in the Image/Transform/free Transform which brought up a new tool bar with rotation, re-sizings and screwing the image...it's a bit more basic I guess then what PS is offering in that you can't just draw lines, like posted above. You have to instead pull and push the corners to get it to do what you want it to but I guess in the end, achieves the same thing.

Thanks again for the help here!

Cheers!

This one takes some pretty radical stretching. Here's one way it can be done in Elements:

1. Duplicate the image onto a new layer.
   
2. Expand the canvas at least 25 percent on top and both sides.
   
3. Ctrl-click the copied layer to select it.
   
4. Hit Ctrl-T to get a transform bounding box around the image.
   
5. Hold the control key and adjust the top corner handles. Pull them out toward the side to correct the tilt on that side. Pull the other top corner to correct tilt on that side. You can also pull those corners up or down to correct horizontal tilt.

Peano,

That's not too bad it still looks like the church is on a slope and in reality, the ground was very level.

I do appreciate the tips though and I'm working my way through them, trying to play with features in PSE that I've never touched before.

Cheers!

The Ghost of FM wrote in post #7939105
Peano,

That's not too bad it still looks like the church is on a slope and in reality, the ground was very level.

You can Ctrl-drag the corner handles to stretch the bottom left corner down and make the base of the church level. But note what will happen: That will stretch the windows on that end, and they'll be larger than the ones on the right.

I've been messing around with it for the past couple hours and think I finally pulled it into the shape I envisioned it should look like and also polished it up a bit with some further tonal enhancements.

How does it look to you folks now?

You may want to download and try ShiftN, which does a pretty good job of automatically correcting some images:

http://www.marcus-hebel.de/index1.html

Mr. Hebel is the program developer/writer and the program is Freeware.

I have used it successfully several times for subjects like your church ....

Maxdave

Maxdave wrote in post #7942134
You may want to download and try ShiftN, which does a pretty good job of automatically correcting some images:

http://www.marcus-hebel.de/index1.html

Mr. Hebel is the program developer/writer and the program is Freeware.

I have used it successfully several times for subjects like your church ....

Maxdave

Thanks for the link!

I downloaded and tried the program out but it didn't really do a stellar job on this particular file. Perhaps it works better on images with less distortion then this particular one?

Cheers!

Here is the corrected photo after processing with Paint Shop Pro...

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