Correcting Perspective in Architectural Photography

Today’s Post by Joe Farace

Wide angle lenses are great for architectural photography but can create the “falling over” building effect that doesn’t always recreate the look produced by a view camera or a Tilt-Shift lens or converter like Kipon’s Tilt- Shift Lens Mount Adapter for Fuji X ($339.) The 300 year old church of San Filepe de Neri in Old Town Albuquerque was photographed using a 12mm f/2.0 lens (24mm equivalent) and there is some perspective distortion due to the 82 degree angle-of-view and how I had the camera titled. This doesn’t bother some people and if that’s you, just bail from this page and look at another post. If is bothers you, here’s a quick and easy way to fix it using Photoshop.

Step 1: Open the file and chose Select > All to select the entire image. Drag a guide line out from the side by making sure Rulers are shown and just drag and grab and place a blue line to guide you in making corrections.

Step 2. Chose Edit > Transform > Perspective that will place handles (a little box) in each corner. Drag one of the top handles straight out and watch the lines in the building start to “correct themselves. You can do this by “eye” or by using one of the guide lines I suggested you drag onto the images.

Step 3: Select Image > Crop and you’re finished.

Something is always lost in correcting the perspective and if you know you’re going to correct perspective you might plan ahead and include some extra material on the sides that will later be cropped when the image is corrected. I finished the image buy tweaking in using the Polarizing filter Nik’s Analog Efex.