Hello everybody, Yanik here for Yanik’s Photo School.

And today we’re going to be doing a little video quickie tutorial in Photoshop, it won’t last very long. I’ve had a request from a reader to basically how to straighten the horizon very quickly without having to guesstimate or basically play around until you finally get it or actually your eyes thinks it’s straight and it’s not really straight. So I have to make sure that the horizon is really, really straight.

Well I’ll show you two ways of doing it. The first one and the one that I use to use when I use to straighten my images in Photoshop was to go and find the ruler tool, which you’ll find by clicking on the eyedropper and holding and then the sub-menu appears and you click on the ruler tool. Now you have a little ruler icon here on the end of your mouse, and all you need to do is take one point of your horizon line and drag it to the other point and then what you need to do is go to image, rotate canvas, arbitrary and you’ll already put the amount that was drawn in by the ruler tool into the rotate canvas box here, all you need to do after that is click Ok, there you go. Now you have a straight horizon. But of course you’re going to be losing part of your image here. All you need to do after that is to use the crop tool and crop out the white or the background whatever color your background is. And there you go; you have an image with a straight horizon.

Now let me undo all of that, and let me just see here, there we go. Now the next way of doing it is a bit like in Lightroom is by using the free transform tool. The first thing you’ll need to do is duplicate your layer. Once you’ve done that by using control J, or command J on the Mac, you’ll go to view, show grid. You see you get a nice grid, so you can basically when you’re using the free transform tool, the rotate, you can use that grid line as a ruler or as a horizon marker if you wish. And then all you need to do is go into edit, transform, rotate. Now you won’t see anything because the rotate pointers are right at the edge of the image, so drag your canvas out a little bit. And then you’ll see some gray area, and go on the outside of the corner and you’ll see the little icon like a rotation icon there, and then all you need to do is to rotate your canvas and follow a line along the horizon until it’s straight. And then double click in your image, and there you go. After that you can always remove the grid, and you got your straight horizon.

So there you go, two ways of having a perfectly straight horizon by using Photoshop. This is Yanik Chauvin from Yanik’s Photo School signing out and talk to you soon. Bye-bye.