How to level the horizon in Photoshop?

It often happens that a beautiful photo has a certain skew, and this becomes a real problem when printing the photo. This happens for various reasons – the wrong angle of the photo is chosen, the photographer’s hand shook, or the hands grow from the wrong place. The main thing that this problem is quite corrected, for which our lesson is created: “How to level the horizon in Photoshop”. Photographer even have a special term for such a problem – “horizon slump”. Today, we will consider two simple ways to get rid of the skew, and align the horizon in beautiful photos with the help of the famous program for image processing Photoshop.

Method #1 – rotate the photo to the desired angle.

Often, beginners try to do this by eye, not getting the desired effect. It is correct to do this operation with the “Guide” function. This is a classic ruler, which is caught by the mouse cursor and pulled downward. Thus, we get a bright horizontal guide that creates a perfect horizon line. It should be placed at the top point of the horizon line.

After, create a new layer in the “Layers” panel (sorry for the tautology), and work in a copy, without fear of spoiling the original. To rotate the image, you need to use hotkeys (Ctrl+T), or perform this sequence of commands: Edit (Edit) – Transform (Transform) – Rotate (Rotate). After that, rotate the picture on the exposed guide line, and remove gray areas of the background (tool Frame (Crop) in the toolbar).

We get the final result:

Method #2 – alignment using the “Frame” function.

Here we will work with horizon alignment using the “Crop” function – the most simple and understandable way for every beginner. By selecting the Crop function, we select with the mouse cursor the area of the image that we need to rotate. At the same time, the selection frame should only slightly go over the lower part of the horizon. After that, rotate the frame exactly to the existing horizon line.

The next step is to stretch the frame without changing the specified angle of its rotation, for which use only stretching the frame by the middle of its sides. It is necessary to stretch the area exactly until the corners of the frame will touch the edges of the canvas, but will not go behind them. To preserve the proportions of the photo, it is worth pressing Shift.

After that, crop by pressing the Enter button, and get the final, perfectly level horizon line.

These two methods of leveling the horizon line are simple and convenient in their execution, and are suitable not only for the horizon, but also for any photo with a skew that needs to be leveled.