Video Tutorial: How to Fix Verticals

Fixing angled verticals is an essential post production step that every professional real estate or architectural photographer should take. Look at your photos and pay attention to the vertical lines created by the wall and furniture edges.

Unnatural angles = bad real estate photography.

Are they perfectly straight up and down, or do they appear angular, as if they would intersect each other if followed beyond the edges of the photo?  This effect happens when the photographer shoots at a slight angle either up or down.  It is best to shoot the camera straight to get the straightest verticals possible, but sometimes it is necessary to tilt in order to get a better composition.

Just Edit >> Transform it!

To fix verticals in Photoshop, get familiar with the Rotate, Perspective, Distort, and Skew functions all found under the Edit >> Transform menu.    Scott Hargis, an excellent real estate photographer in the San Fransisco Bay area, recently created a detailed video tutorial describing how to fix verticals in Photoshop using the Transform tools. (Watch the video below)

Scott Hargis:  How to Fix Verticals (the video):

Why care about verticals?  Because it makes a photo look more natural.   Larry Lorhman describes in his post regarding verticals below:

First of all, why are verticals even a big deal? The problem comes from the fact that we all live in an environment that as perfectly vertical walls. Try walking into some building that has a wall out of plumb. You’ll have a problem even finding a building that doesn’t have vertical walls, but if you could find one, imagine how it would feel; disorienting to say the least.

Because we live in this vertical world, where gravity defines up and down and vertical defines the direction gravity is pulling, we all have this built-in hyper-sensitivity to vertical. If we walk into a building with the verticals off or look at photo where the verticals are off we feel a tension or uneasiness. It’s an unconscious warning in our head that says, “something is wrong here”. As a real estate photographer you want to keep verticals perfectly parallel with the edge of the photo so this tension is eliminated and doesn’t distract from your main message. – PFRE

Straightening verticals on an interior or exterior architectural photo is one of the most important steps you can take in post-production.  Be sure to use your Edit >> Transform, Distort, Perspective and Skew tools along with your