Apply perspective corrections and adjust the geometry characteristics of an image for professional-looking photo compositions.

Photo of two people walking by a dilapidated and colorful building with graffiti

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom offers powerful automatic and manual methods for adjusting the perspective in a photograph.

Perspective correction with Upright

The Upright feature in Lightroom’s Geometry panel is often the quickest way to correct perspective in a photo. Upright makes an intelligent perspective correction with your choice of these options:

  • Level: Straightens lines horizontally and is useful for straightening a crooked horizon.
  • Vertical: Corrects for converging vertical lines. It is commonly used to adjust photos of tall buildings photographed from a low angle that appear to be leaning backward. 
  • Auto: Often the best option. It applies both leveling and vertical corrections while trying to deliver a natural-looking result.
  • Full: Similar to Auto, but more extreme.

Sometimes an upright adjustment will result in white space at the edges of a photo. You can try to crop away those edges automatically using Upright’s Constrain Crop option. If you don’t like the result, try the Crop tool instead.

Side by side images of a theater interior with one side cropped and straightened

User-defined perspective correction with Guided Upright

For more customized perspective correction, try the Guided Upright feature, which allows you to define which lines in a scene should be horizontal or vertical by drawing guides along those lines. Guided Upright is especially effective on images where there are multiple lines in a photo, all at slightly different angles.

Side by side images of a lighthouse and buildings with one side cropped and straightened

Manual transform adjustments

If you find that additional corrections are needed, there are also manual transform controls, hidden behind a small icon in the Geometry panel. These can correct for image distortion, like the bulge of barrel distortion or the pinched look of pincushion distortion. There are sliders to shift the vertical or horizontal axis of an image, rotate an image, scale an image, and more. Don’t overlook the Aspect Ratio slider; it can be useful after you apply an Upright correction that makes an image look too wide or too narrow.

Experiment with the Upright options, Guided Upright, and the manual Transform controls to correct even tricky perspective problems in your photos.

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