Written by If you were to photo an image from a magazine, books, photograph etc, you might not always get it at the exact angle where it is perfectly allign, and if you were at a slight angle than good luck trying to align the photo and get it to be in the right perspective. Luckily, Photoshop allows you to crop a photo based on it’s perspective. Here is an example
crop and align a photo in Photoshop
To start, activate the crop tool with short cut C or select crop on the tool bar, draw a crop mark around the photo, don’t worry about aligning it right now. (click here to learn more about crop tools)
On the tool bar, the very last item says Perspective, check that box.
Now if you drag the corner of the crop mark, you will notice you will be able to draw each corner freely without being restricted to a rectangle. Drag all the corner to the corner of the magazine.
When you are done dragging all the corners of the crop mark to the corner of the magazine, either hit the Entire key or double click inside the crop mark. Your image should now be perfectly aligned and in the right perspective.
Lastly, you might want to adjust the color since your camera might not translate the color accurately, I will use the LAB color technique to adjust it. Go to menu and under Image – Mode – LAB to change the color space, click here to learn more about LAB mode Here are the setting I used.
and here is the final image, fairly close to a scanned image if you do not own a scanner wouldn’t you agree?
Similiarly if you want to rotate an image, you can change the crop mark by rotating it instead of the photo itself. Here is a vertical image, I want to make it in to a square image while rotating it 45 degree angle. I start by drawing a square crop, hold shift and drag.
Expand the crop mark beyond the file itself and rotate the crop mark 45 degrees.
The final image takes on the space that the crop made but right side up.
if you have questions about this tutorial please posted it in the comment section, and see more tutorial on Tools here
