Anything Photoshop or Photography

Archive for July, 2011

The Ruler Tool Rules in Photoshop CS5!

Have you ever gotten all the way through an image and suddenly realized that your horizon line is off just a tad and it starts driving you crazy? I try to straighten my images in Adobe Lightroom as a first step before I do anything, but there are times the horizon just gets messed up. I personally have never liked fixing horizons in Photoshop – I thought it was very cumbersome. Along comes CS5 with little known enhancement.

  1. First go to the Eyedropper Tool and select the Ruler Tool in the fly-out menu.
  2. Click and drag a line along the crooked horizon.
  3. Go to Options Bar and select the Straighten Button.

Voila, your horizon is straightened and cropped in one big swoop!  By the way, if you do not want the image cropped, just straightened, hold down the ALT key when clicking the Straighten Button.

Sometimes it is not so obvious which is the horizon line as in the image above – it is easy to line up with the wrong horizontal or vertical line. Above is a before and after I used the Ruler Tool – it is a subtle but important difference. (Applied a Vintage preset in Adobe Lightroom to get the nostalgic look.) Hope this was helpful!…..Digital Lady Syd


Digital Lady Syd’s Rule No. 1: Take the Time to Experiment!

For my first blog “tidbit,” I thought I would show an example of using in Photoshop the Plugin Galaxy Instant Mirror effect. Sometimes you get some really interesting results using this filter on an image that did not look like much originally.

See my entry on Photoshop Fun blog called “Instant Mirror and Quick Mirror for Photoshop.”

 

Digital Lady Syd’s Photoshop Rule No. 1:

When stuck and not sure where to go next in Photoshop, EXPERIMENT.