Correcting Photographic Perspective

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Correcting Photographic Perspective

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007 | Photos |

A couple of people pointed me to Ken Rockwell’s photography page, which is outstanding. One thing that blew me away was his simple technique for correcting perspective.

Here’s a photo I took last week in downtown Knoxville. (It’s the East Tennessee Historical Society, which my wife tells me used to be the Customs House.)

That’s the before picture. You can tell I took it standing at the base of the building looking up. You can avoid that with a $2,000 tilt-shift lens, or you can use Rockwell’s simple Photoshop technique. Here’s the after picture, which looks like I took it while floating in mid-air in front of the building:

During the correction the bottom of the picture shrinks, so I had to crop the sides to get rid of the empty bottom corners. I tend to shoot pictures tight so that I don’t have to go back and crop them later, but this is a good example of a time when I should have left extra room around the subject.

2 Comments to Correcting Photographic Perspective

Teddy
December 19, 2007

That is amazing. I never use photo shop but still I would never think you could edit this well. Thanks for the tip.

Oleg’s tilt-shift photography | Les Jones
October 9, 2008

[...] Perspective control is also called tilt-shift. It allows you to alter the angle of the lens elements inside the lens body. The best-known use for tilt-shift photography is architecture. Using a tilt-shift allows you to keep the architectural lines straight, even when shooting tall buildings from the ground. (You can sort of fake correct perspective using Photoshop. [...]