Save the practice image

This beach scene is awfully crooked. I'm going to show you how easy it is to correct with the crop tool in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Other methods of straightening aren't always best for digital photos:

• In Photoshop, you can use the measure tool to drag a line across the horizon. Photoshop will remember the angle, and when you go to rotate the image, it will automatically fill in the correct angle of rotation. However, when you use this method on a photo that only has a background layer, you'll still need to crop the image as second step. You might as well do it all in one step with the crop tool.

• Photoshop Elements has two commands for automatically straightening an image. Image > Rotate > Straighten Image, or Image > Rotate > Straighten and Crop Image. However, these commands were designed for scanned images that weren't placed on the scanner glass straight. It usually doesn't work for digital photos with a skewed horizon, because there's no way to indicate to Elements what should be horizontal.

Any time you have an image with a skewed horizon, you're going to have to lose something from the edges of the photo. The sides of the image will have to be cropped to make up for the slanting of the photo from rotation. Since you always have to crop a photo when you rotate, it makes sense to rotate and crop in one step with the crop tool.
Right click on the image above and save it to your computer if you'd like to follow along. Then continue to the next page.

Select the crop tool and clear any options

Start by selecting the crop tool, and make sure there are no numbers entered into any of the fields of the options bar. If there are, press the clear button to remove any crop tool settings.

Drag a starting crop rectangle

Now click in the document window and drag out a crop rectangle that is much smaller than the overall size of your image, but don't commit the crop yet.

Align with the horizon line

Click inside the crop rectangle, and drag it so that either the top or bottom middle control handle is right on top of the horizon line. In this image, we are using the true horizon line, but in some photos you might not have a true horizon line. In those cases, you can use any line that should be horizontal-- it may be a roofline, sidewalk, fence, or something else.

Move to a corner handle

Move your cursor to just outside of a corner handle on the crop marquee--it will change to a curved, double pointed arrow, indicating that you can rotate the crop marquee.

Rotate the crop marquee

When you get the rotate cursor, click and drag the marquee to rotate it until the edge of your crop marquee is aligned precisely with the horizon line.

Now drag out the sides of the crop marquee until it encompasses as much of the image as it can without taking the corners outside of the document borders.

Apply the crop permanently by double clicking inside the marquee, hitting the enter key, or clicking the "commit" check mark in the options bar.