One of the more important “rules” in photography is to make sure you shoot with a straight horizon.  This is especially the case with landscape photography. Of course like many “rules” in photography it should be viewed more as a guideline and not a law that should never be broken. Meaning, if you find that a particular shot would benefit creatively with a crooked horizon then go for it! But… in more cases than not you will want a straight horizon. In this blog I will show you how to easily accomplish your straight horizon.

You can achieve a straight horizon either while you’re shooting your photos or during post editing. I recommend trying your best to take your photos correctly in the first place rather than depending on Photoshop to fix this error. Reason being, in the process of straightening your photo in Photoshop, you will end up cropping out parts of your image.

Shooting with a straight horizon

Many tripods have a built-in bubble level that will show you whether or not the camera is straight. Even if the ground is rocky and angled, you can adjust the legs until the bubble indicates that you are shooting level.

Some DSLR (Digital single-lens reflex) cameras incorporate an Acceleration Sensor feature which quickly and accurately displays a graphic on the LCD to show the camera’s position relative to the actual horizon.

This is what the Sensor looks like on a Nikon and Canon. Other cameras such as Sony and Pentax may also have this feature depending on the camera model.

Fixing the horizon in Photoshop

In some cases you may find that some of your images were not shot with a straight horizon. This can happen to the best of us. Maybe we were just shooting away trying to capture as much as we could and forgot to check the horizon, or maybe we were just too busy to make adjustments on camera. In any case, this is when Photoshop can be your best friend. Hmm maybe I need to reasses my social life and find some more friends.

With Photoshop CS5 (Creative Suite 5) this can be relatively easy. We will only need to use one tool to straighten your horizon. Keep in mind that your image will end up being cropped a bit on the edges in order to accomplish the effect. The amount of cropping will depend on the severity of your horizon.

We are going to take this beach shot that has a terribly crooked horizon and fix it as if nothing was ever wrong.

You can download the beach image and follow along if you like.

DownloadBeach Image

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Step 1

Make sure that you have your rulers open on your image. If it is open you will see a vertical and horizontal measurement on the left and top of your image.

You can turn on your ruler by pressing Command R (Mac) or Control R (Windows).

The ruler will help us see if our horizon is straight or not. To do so click on the top ruler and drag down toward your horizon. You should see a horizontal guide. In this case our image is so bad that we do not need a guide to know wether or not our horizon is off. So let’s get to it!

Step 2

In your tools window click  and hold on the eye drop tool. This will open a submenu with four new tools to choose from. Click on the Ruler Tool. This is different from the Ruler we turned on in Step one. Step 1 was a Ruler guide, we are now using the Ruler Tool.

Once you have your tool selected, click and drag from the left side of the image to the right outlining the horizon. This will let Photoshop know what to view as the horizon line. If you have made your line and notice it is crooked just click on either side and you can drag the line up or down in order to accurately trace the horizon.

If you feel the need to start all over just click the clear button towards the top for the page. This will clear your ruler line and allow you to add a new one.

Once you are happy with your line, all you have to do is click on the Straighten button located to the left of the Clear button.

Now your horizon should be fixed!

If you find that your horizon is still crooked click control | option z a few times to go back 2 steps in your history and redraw your Ruler.

You will find that our image has been cropped quite a bit. This is because the image’s horizon was badly crooked. Photoshop had to turn the photo a lot to give us a straight line. In the end the cropping did not affect the image negatively and the straight horizon fixes our photo tremendously.

Thats all there is to it. You’re done! Please leave me a comment if you have any questions or any fun Photoshop tutorials of your own. If you would like a tutorial about something else Photoshop, or anything design related, please let me know in the comments section below.