Les Jones

Photos > Correcting Photographic Perspective

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.