how t o Use Skew t o B anish dis tortion & Straighten buildings

1 What’s the problem? When a camera is held at an angle to a building – tipped up or down, rather than perfectly straight-on – a phenomenon known as “converging verticals” occurs in the image. This is where the top of the building looks smaller than the bottom. Unless you’re using it for effect, images look better when it’s corrected. 2 Reach for the Skew Although it can’t work in fullresolution mode as an extension, SKEW is useful for correcting converging verticals, flipping images, leveling horizons and so on. To stop a building looking like it’s toppling over, the first step after opening SKEW’s tools is to tap the icon third from the right at the bottom of the screen. 3 Select the corners Your image will now be surrounded by a frame with dots at the corners. The dot at the top-left corner will be blue to indicate it’s selected. Simply tap another corner once to select it. To select an edge, tap the small box at the center of the edge line. Tapping the box at the center of the image selects all four corners together. 4 And… stretch To correct converging verticals, select the top corners one at a time and drag them outwards so that the top of the building looks the correct size relative to the bottom. In many cases you’ll want to move the corners out without moving them up or down, so it can be useful to use the arrows at the bottom of the screen. 5 Drag it into shape You may want to select the side edges and drag them up or down to correct other issues. Here we’ve made the roof of the cathedral level by dragging the right side down – this couldn’t be achieved satisfactorily with the level tool, because it rotates the whole image. Once you’re happy, tap the green check mark at the top right. 6 Crop to finish Tap done (top right) to confirm the adjustments and then use Photos’ Crop tool to crop out any blank areas at the edge of the image. Drag the corners or the edges of the Crop selection box to exclude the blank spaces and create a composition that you like. Tapping the box in the corner reveals a selection of aspect ratios that can be used.