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.

Lightroom CC Geometry panel explained

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Lightroom comes in two versions. Lightroom Classic CC, the ‘desktop’ version, is probably the most popular, especially amongst long-term Lightroom users, but Lightroom CC has a lot to commend it. On the downside, it means paying extra for Adobe Creative Cloud storage – the 20GB with the regular Photography Plan is not enough, and the […]

DxO ViewPoint 3 review

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How to fix glare with perspective correction

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Here’s an interesting little problem you often get when photographing paintings or other pictures. You get the camera perfectly perpendicular to the picture, only to find you’ve got horrible glare from the surface of the picture, completely ruining the shot. So here’s the problem. I didn’t have a polarising filter with me, which might have […]

Capture One keystone correction tips

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Keystone correction is usually used to fix converging verticals in architectural shots – that’s the most obvious use for the Capture One keystone correction tools – but this vertical keystone correction isn’t the only kind you’ll need. Keystone distortion happens when you tilt the camera relative to your subject, and this can mean horizontal tilt […]

How to use the DxO Force Parallel tool

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DxO Optics Pro’s speciality is optical corrections. It does this using a combination of automatic lens corrections and manual perspective adjustment options, including the DxO Force Parallel tool. DxO Optics Pro can identify the lens and camera used to take a picture from the shooting (EXIF) information embedded in the image by the camera, and […]

Straighten up your shots with the DxO Force Rectangle tool

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DxO Optics Pro uses custom-made lens correction profiles to fix the distortion issues inherent in nearly all lenses, but it goes further than that – it can also correct the perspective distortion created when you photograph a rectangular object at a slight angle, thanks to the DxO Force Rectangle tool . You often don’t notice […]