Life after Photoshop

Perspective correction

If you do a lot of travel or architectural photography you'll know all about the problems of perspective. The most common issue is converging verticals, or keystone distortion, where you had to tilt the camera upwards to get the whole of the subject in the frame, and this has made the sides of the subject lean inwards.

But smaller problems can be just as annoying, such as a slight horizontal skew that leaves things you know should be horizontal on a slant. Or a perfectly rectangular facade that's actually not quite rectangular because you couldn't shoot it from dead opposite.

All of these things can be fixed with digital perspective correction tools. Lightroom and Capture One Pro offer built in perspective correction tools – and other programs like Luminar, Exposure X and ON1 Photo RAW can do the same.

Note that you should only carry out perspective correction after you've applied lens corrections to fix any lens distortion. Any trace of barrel or pincushion distortion makes it impossible to judge if a line or object is properly horizontal or vertical.

Perspective correction might seem like a relatively technical and unimportant job, but it can make a big difference to pictures of landmarks and buildings.

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How to fix glare with perspective correction

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Capture One keystone correction tips

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Fixing perspective is easy with Capture One Pro’s Keystone Vertical tool

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Lightroom 5’s new Upright tool

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Lightroom looks and feels a lot like Lightroom 4, but there are some key new features. One of these is the new Upright tool, which can automatically correct perspective problems in shots of buildings and other rectangular objects. Note: In the latest versions of Lightroom, the Upright tools are now found in the Geometry panel. […]