Crooked Horizons in your Photos? - 5 Minute Digital Fixby Gary Wilkinson

emember the good old photography days?

Film camera in hand, you would see that perfect landscape, seascape or sunset and shoot off several shots.

Perhaps a couple of weeks later, once you had returned home and finally finished that 24 or 36 exposure film, it was off to the photo-lab to get the film processed.

You eagerly open the packet of photographs, looking for that superb seascape you took, knowing that it would almost certainly be taken up by National Geographic for their monthly magazine spread.

What do you find?

A not too bad photo, but the seascape horizon is crooked, here's your excuse, I hear you say.. "Well when I took the shot I was standing on the side of a sand dune and quickly trying to get that perfect shot while the little sailboat was still in view".

Does this sound familiar to all you budding Adam Ansels and/or Lord Snowdons?

The photo is relegated back to the packet never again to see the light of day.

I had many of those packets of not so perfect photos until the digital photography age arrived.

The Digital Darkroom has arrived

The advent of the digital camera and in fact, before that, computerized image manipulation software such as Adobe Photoshop has completely revolutionized the way we can now resurrect a stunning image from what at face value might have appeared to be just one of those snapshots to be relegated to the shoebox under the stairs.

What I'm going to show you in this article is just one method of taking a mundane snapshot and producing a great shot in as little as five minutes.

The example I'm going to use, is one that I have seen so many times, and have already mentioned above, namely, shots that have crooked horizons, whether this be a landscape, seascape, sunset or whatever.

The source of the image may have come from a scanned negative, scanned print or digital camera image all converted to an image format (most probably .JPG pronounced "jaypeg") that can be opened in your image manipulation software.