This tutorial is about cropping, straightening and correcting perspective in your photos. In this lesson, we'll cover cropping a photo. If you're following along with the sample files for this tutorial, add them to Lightroom CC as explained in the first tutorial in this "Get Started" series. If you need a quick reminder how that's done, click the Add Photos button here and navigate to the sample files you downloaded from the Adobe page for this tutorial. In the Import preview window that opens, you have the option to make a new album for the tutorial four files as you add them. Click Add Photos there and you'll be back in one of the grid views. For this lesson, select this photo of a feather, and click the Edit button over here or press E on your keyboard. Over on the right, you'll see the Crop tool. Click the Crop tool or press the letter C on your keyboard to open the Crop tool options. Cropping a photo is useful to remove unwanted content at the edges or to change the shape of the photo, for example to make a photo square, or most often to improve the overall composition. Let's see how this photo looks if we crop away the extra white space at the top of the photo. When you select the Crop tool, a crop box appears around the photo. Click any edge of the crop box and drag inward to make the box smaller; dragging outward makes it bigger. Notice that no matter how big or small I make this crop box, it stays the same shape, and I can't just drag one of the edges separately from the others. That's because over in the Crop options, this Lock icon is locked. If I click the Lock icon to unlock it, now I can come back into the photo and drag any edge freely. When you've got the crop box the size that you want it, click inside the crop box and drag to position the photo inside the box. Notice the overlay of intersecting lines that represents the rule of thirds, a traditional rule of composition that artists have used for centuries. The idea is that you can often improve a composition by placing an important part of a photo where these lines intersect. Now, you don't have to follow that rule but sometimes it can help with composition. When you're done sizing the crop box and positioning the photo in the box, click the Enter or Return key on your keyboard to commit the crop. Like any change you make to a photo in Lightroom CC, a crop isn't permanent. You can always go back and recrop the photo or go back to the original. So, I'll go back over and select the Crop tool again. If I wanted to go back to the original, I would go to the Aspect menu here and choose Original. There are some other useful options in the Aspect menu. Here you can choose some common aspect ratios, that means the ratio of width to height. So, if you chose 1 x 1, you would get a square crop box, or if you choose 4 x 5 that's the same shape as 8 x 10. They're both in the same aspect ratio. Let's go ahead and choose that, and now when I drag any of the edges of the crop box, it stays in those proportions. And then I'll move the photo where I want it inside the crop box. Another Crop option that sometimes comes in handy, is this option here that rotates the crop box. So, when I click that, the crop box goes from a vertical orientation to a horizontal orientation. And then I would come in and move the photo inside the box, and I might make this box a little bigger. But it stays in that same 4 x 5 aspect ratio. Also in the Crop options, we have a Straighten feature, which we'll look at in the next lesson, and down here, we can Rotate & Flip the photo. I'm going to finish up by going up here and rotating the crop box again so it's vertical. And then, I'll move in and I'll move the photo inside the crop box, trying to use the rule of thirds a bit to position the feather, and I think I'm going to make the crop box a little smaller. When I'm satisfied, I'll press Enter or Return on my keyboard to commit the crop. To compare a before and after view, when you crop, you can't use just this icon down here. So instead, I'm going to go over to the more menu on the right and I'll choose Revert to Original, and that's where we started, and then I'll undo by pressing Command Z on the Mac, or Control Z on Windows. And that's how the photo looks with this crop. So, as you can see, we've really changed the composition of this photo using the Crop tool and its options here in Lightroom CC.

When you're taking a photo without a tripod, it can be hard to get a horizon level or to make other horizontal or vertical content as straight as you might like in a photo. That's OK, because you can fix that later with Lightroom CC's Straighten features as we'll see in this lesson. Select this photo from the sample files for this tutorial or use a photo of your own that has horizontal or vertical content that could use straightening. Click the Edit icon or press E on your keyboard. The Straighten features are located along with the Crop tool, so, click the Crop tool or press C on your keyboard. You can go to Straighten here and try to click Auto. Sometimes, this is all you need. Now, this photo needs a lot of straightening to get that horizon to be horizontal. And so, the Auto feature really didn't do the job completely. It just rotated the photo a little bit to make it a bit straighter. So, I'm going to undo, Command Z on a Mac, or Control Z on Windows, and we'll try the manual method of straightening. And that is to just take the Straighten slider and drag either right or left. And as you drag, notice that a grid appears. All you have to do is get the horizon line to match up with a horizontal line in the grid. What Lightroom CC has done is create a crop box and rotated the photo inside the crop box. Now, everything outside the crop box is going to be cropped away when we commit this straightening. But that's a compromise we'll have to make if we want a straight horizon on this photo. So, I'm going to press Enter or Return on the keyboard to commit the straightening. And that's all there is to it. The good news is that like all edits in Lightroom CC, this edit doesn't alter the original photo. So, you can always go back in and change the amount of straightening and bring back some of that edge content if you like.

 

Sometimes you'll have a photo that needs an adjustment to perspective to remove distortion caused by your lens and/or your angle of view. For example, when you shoot up at a tall building, the building may look like it's leaning backwards in your photo. Or depending on your camera's lens, lines that should look straight in a subject may look bowed or skewed. Fortunately, Lightroom CC has simple but powerful tools to deal with problems like this and they're located in the Geometry panel. To take a look at those, let's select this photo from the sample files or a photo of your own that has some perspective challenges. Then, click the Edit icon or press E on your keyboard. Now, here's a photo that has lots of horizontal and vertical lines and you may think it looks just fine as it is and that's OK. But if you do want to square up some of those lines, go to the Geometry panel, and then go to this Upright section. Click the down facing arrow to display a menu that contains four automatic perspective correction options beneath this line: Auto, Level, Vertical and Full. You can quickly try out these options on a photo with just one click on each. I'm going to try Level first, keep your eye at the top of that building of many colors and you'll see that clicking Level straighten that out. I'll go back to Upright, clicking the down facing arrow, and this time I'm going to try Vertical. And that does shift the building forward a bit, making it look straighter. Let's try Auto. Auto tries to correct multiple perspective problems and it's often a good choice. And then there's Full, which is similar to Auto, but sometimes give you a more strict or less natural result. So, I'm going to go back to Auto, and that may be all you want to do with this photo. But I'd like to show you one more feature and that is Guided Upright. Guided Upright is a manual option that gives you more control over the adjustments. I'll go back to that same down facing arrow and this time choose Guided. Now, I'll come into the image and I'm going start by drawing a line along the top of this building because I'd like to straighten that up. The circle near my cursor magnifies the view, so I can really see where I'm placing my cursor, and where I'm drawing the line. And as soon as I start to drag, you can see a faint white line appearing along the top of the building. Now, when I release my finger from the mouse, nothing happens, and that's as it should be when you're using Guided Upright. You have to draw another line to see a result. So, let's say that I also want to have this yellow line in the street, be leveled with the bottom of the photo. I'll click and drag along that yellow line and you don't have to go all the way across, just enough to set up the line where you want it. And as soon as I release my finger from the mouse, you can see the result. Let's do a before-and-after, I'm going to press the Backslash key on my keyboard, or you can click this icon here. So, that's where we started a second ago and that's where we are with two Guided Upright lines. And you can also add vertical lines. So, let's say that I want to straighten up these multicolored columns in the building. I'll go to the right of this column and I'll click and drag a bit to create a vertical line. And if you look closely, you'll see that the building is standing a bit more upright than it was a second ago. So, if you're ever working with photos of your own that have perspective challenges like these, give Guided Upright and the Automatic Upright options a try.