Photo Tip – How to Straighten Walls in Photoshop Elements

Have you ever ended up with an oddly angled wall in a photograph of a room?   If you are using a wide angle lens, this seems to happen more often. Sometimes if you are looking from a high angle down on a room – I do this a lot in kitchens to show off appliances –  it works well to leave the odd angles.

It is obvious in this picture that I am looking down on the room to show off the appliances and tops of the counters.

When you are really looking more directly at  room and the walls are slanted like the second photo, it is better to try and correct the angle.

With a few simple steps you can make the walls in a photo straighter.

Step by Step instructions:

While your photo is open and in the workspace of Photoshop Elements go to the top menu bar and click on “Image” > “Transform” > “Skew”

You might get a message asking if you wish to create a new layer. If so, select “Yes”

Now make sure that your image is small enough to see all of the corners of your image with additional space around all four sides. You can do this easily on your PC by clicking “Ctrl -” (the minus symbol) on your Mac it’s “Command -” (also the minus symbol).

Place your cursor on the corner you wish to move out – hold down the left mouse button and drag the corner out until your wall is mostly straight. Go to the opposite corner and drag that corner out to straighten the other side.

This image shows how far I dragged out the corners to straighten the walls in this particular image.

Once you are pleased with the results click on the Check Mark. Next you want to go to “Layer” > “Flatten Image” . The reason for this is make the file itself smaller and easier to save as a jpeg file.

Let me know if you have any comments or questions.

Photo Tip – What a difference changing the carpet makes.

I think it is a great idea that once a homeowner has made changes after the home has been photographed and listed that you go back to take pictures of those changes. It’s also a good idea to refresh the listing after changing out the pictures.

I just reshot a house this week. What a difference the new brown carpet makes on this home.

 

 

Photo Tip – Lightening Shadows and Darkening Highlights Can Improve a Photo

When you are out photographing a home usually one side of the home has more sunlight on it than does another side. We try to take the front photos when the sun is on them, but sometimes it doesn’t work out. Here in Colorado the clouds tend to move in sometime in the afternoon. So, I usually schedule to photograph in the mornings.

You can easily use Photoshop Elements (I currently use version 7) to lighten the shadow areas and darken some of the highlight areas. Which helps me go from this:

 to this: