Change The Perspective Of A Photo

It isn't always possible to take a photo at the location and angle that you want. But you can straighten the photo afterwards on your Mac using most major image editing tools. Learn how to change the perspective and straighten a photo in Pixelmator, Acorn and Photoshop.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode I'm going to show you how to take a photo that looks like this and turn it into this.
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So it's not always possible to get the perfect shot. Here I'm trying to get a straight on view of the front of this building. Now one thing I would need to do is hover in mid air to do that and I'm not quite capable of that. Another thing I need to do it stand further back and I've got another building right behind me. So I can't do that either. But I can use photo editing software to change this image so that it looks like I'm shooting it straight on from far away.
I'm going to do this using the app Pixelmator. I'm using Pixelmator version 3.8.3. It's pretty easy to do in Pixelmator because there's a tool specifically for this. I'm going to go to Edit and then Transform. Once I'm in Transform mode I can click the Settings button here and change the mode to Perspective. Let's first zoom out a bit so we can see a little bit of the surrounding area because I'm going to grab this point here. I'm going to drag it out to change the perspective. The idea here is I'm looking at the windows to get a vertical line. You can see there are three sets of windows in the main part of the building. The top one with the shutters open. I want to get those to basically line up so there's a vertical line going from here all the way down.
Once I get it, and it doesn't have to be exactly perfect just pretty good, then I hit Okay. I've done that part. Next I notice that there's a little bit of a slant here. I'm not particularly level with this. So I'm going to rotate things. I'm going to Transform again. This time I'm going to leave it at Free Transform. If I grab a corner here and hold the Command key down I can rotate. I can move a little bit here to the right to get this a little bit more horizontal. Just lining this up to be more horizontal. Now I'll hit Okay.
Now that I've done that I have a little extra piece here that is not filled in at the bottom. Also I don't think I want this top part of the building there. Some I'm going to use the crop tool and I'm going to crop from here and then down to the bottom. I'm going to hold the Command key down so it doesn't snap to the bottom there. Then crop it.
So this works best on photos that show very flat things. The face of a building works really well as long as there's nothing protruding or you can't see into the building too much. It also works great if you take a picture of a painting. So if you're at a gallery or art museum or something like that and take a picture of a painting but you can't get it straight on and you want it to look like the actual painting you can use this technique to correct the perspective.
Let me show you quickly how you would do this in a couple of other tools. Here I am in Acorn version 6.33. To do the perspective transformation you go to Layer, Rotate and Transform, Perspective Transform. Each corner is independent so I want to drag this one out and then this one out. I actually want to work with each one a few times because they kind of fight each other a little bit until I get things, more or less, what I want. Double click to Apply. Then go to Layer, Rotate and Transform, and Scale and Rotate. Now if I click outside of the area I can rotate and get a little bit more horizontal. Double click on it to Apply it. Then I can use their cropping tool here to do a similar crop. Hold the Control key down so it doesn't snap to the bottom. Double click to Apply and now I've got the same result.
Finally, here's how to do it in PhotoShop. The first thing you want to do is Select All. Just do Command A there and then I'll go to Edit, Transform, and Perspective. It's a very similar tool to what we've been using before. Grab a corner here and drag it out. Get those windows to be vertical. Then you can click the check to Commit. Go to Edit and Transform Rotate. Now we can rotate this a little bit to get it a little more horizontal. Commit that. Now we can use the Crop tool and crop in to just the area that we want. At the bottom here I'm going to use the Control key so I can not have it snap to the bottom. Commit to that and we have our result there in PhotoShop.
So you may wonder if you can just do this in the Photos app. There's no perspective tool in the Photos app but you can edit with an external editor. So you can jump right from your photo to one of these three editors and then back again. So here I am in Photos. I've got the photo I want to change. I'll go to Image, Edit With, and I've got all my apps here, PhotoShop, Acorn, Pixelmator. I'll take it into Pixelmator and it opens it up as a document. Zoom out a bit and make the change just as I did before except it's going to take a little bit more work with this particular photo but eventually I get something that I think looks pretty decent. I'll go and then just Save and Close. The changed photo is now in my Photos app. Since Photos is nondestructive I can always go into Edit here. I can compare it to the original or Revert to that original if I want to.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Change The Perspective Of A Photo”

Cameron

6 years ago

Can this also be achieved in Pixelmator for iOS?

Gary Rosenzweig

Cameron: Give it a try and see.

If this functionality does exist in Pixelmator for iOS, I can’t find it. In the format menu, under the arrange tab, I can flip, rotate, and change height/width pixels, nothing more. Shucky darn.

Ken

Well done video, Gary.

May I suggest a "Plan B"? When you are shooting the photo, if you can include a little more area in the photo, you may be able to keep the camera parallel with the building. That way, all you ned to do is crop the photo to what you originally wanted. The perspective will remain correct. The same thing applies looking down.

Comments Closed.

Change The Perspective Of A Photo

Comments: 4 Responses to “Change The Perspective Of A Photo”

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