How to Stretch and Straighten a Photo in Photoshop Elements 2019

Watch the Adobe Photoshop Elements 2019 video training tutorial below. Learn the various methods to straighten an image using different straightening tools. Tools shown include the Stretch and Grow canvas, crop to remove background and crop to original size.

Welcome back to our course on PSE 2019. In this section, we’re going to look at straightening images. I’ll start off with an introduction to straightening.

Then, we’ll look at the three standard tools to use for straightening, the Grow or Shrink Canvas to Fit tool, the Crop to Remove Background tool, the Crop to Original Size tool. And then, I’ll look at one or two other options for straightening images.

Straightening is another one of those operations that photographers tend to need to perform quite a bit. Now, in terms of PSE, what we mean by straightening is generally making something that should be horizontal or something that should be vertical.

And in fact, the tools can be used for either of those purposes. Although in this section, I will primarily be concerned with making this church or I should say the base of this church horizontal. The picture has been taken at an angle and the whole church seems to be leaning over to one side.

Now, be aware of the fact that there may be other factors in force here, such as perspective. But in terms of showing you the tools and how to use them, we’ll ignore that for the moment. We’ll just assume that I want to make this church look as though it’s standing on flat ground if you like.

There are a couple of particular problems that occur when you try to straighten an image. It sounds like a pretty straightforward thing to do but there are a couple of problems. And I’m going to demonstrate them now by using the Free Transform that we saw earlier in the course.

I’m going to go up to the Image menu. And I’m going to go to Transform, Free Transform. Then, I’m going to hover just outside the image.

Note, the double-headed bendy arrow. And, I’m going to rotate this image so that the church sits flat on the ground. Now, that’s not quite perfect but it’ll serve for our purposes.

Now, the church itself looks a little bit more stable there. But you can now see the two principal problems that we get. One of them is that I’ve lost quite a bit of picture. There are four sections of pictures that are now outside the canvas and they’re lost.

I also have four gaps. You can see the transparent background in four places. I lose picture and I gain gaps. There are specific straightening tools in PSE that are basically designed to overcome those two problems, or at least to help us overcome those two problems. Let’s take a look at those next. Let me Undo that.

The straightening tools are in the Modify group, bottom right-hand corner. Click on Straighten tool. And in fact, it’s really described here as one tool and three options but I think of it as three tools really.

First of all, we have Grow or Shrink Canvas to Fit. We have Crop to Remove Background, and we have Crop to Original Size. Let’s start with that one, Grow or Shrink Canvas to Fit.

All I have to do is to draw either a vertical line or I should say a line that should be vertical or a horizontal line. That is a line that should be horizontal.

Since in this case, I want to make the bottom of the church horizontal. What I’m going to do is to click at one edge of the picture and draw. Just click, keep the mouse down, drag, a line along a line that I think should be horizontal. Having drawn that I release the mouse and PSE makes that a horizontal line.

Now, you can see that I still have one of my two problems. The problem I’ve got is the gaps. I’ve got even bigger gaps, but I haven’t lost any pictures.

The reason that I haven’t lost any picture is that PSE has made the whole image bigger to accommodate the whole original picture. It’s basically grown to accommodate the picture and my horizontal base of the church is now close enough to horizontal for my purposes. So, that’s one of the tools.

The disadvantage of that tool is that it makes the whole picture bigger. That may or may not be a problem. And we’ve now got these four big gaps.

Let me undo that. I’m going to use the same tool again but this time what I’m going to do is to check this option, Autofill Edges. What happens with this option is that PSE will use its own intelligence to fill in the gaps. Let me draw again.

I’ll try and get as close as I can to the original horizontal. So, I’ll make this picture as much like it was as I can this time. It has to do a little bit more thinking now as you’ll see. Because not only has it got to make the picture horizontal but it’s got to work out what to put in the gaps.

Now, what it’s actually done is to create a picture. In each of those four areas that suffered gaps, it’s used what pixels there were in the immediate vicinity of the gaps to fill in some pictures. At first glance, I think that’s not a bad job.

The sky and the clouds are completely believable. I can’t see anything there that looks out of place. The big bap on the right is perhaps the only one where we’ve got a sort of duplicated feature there. But I’m not sure that anybody looking at this picture would particularly recognize that as a duplicated feature.

I think we definitely get away with the trees and so on on the left. We have a bigger picture now but no gaps. And of course, some of the pictures are fake.

It’s been created by PSE. Some people just don’t like fake bits in pictures. I have my reservations, although sometimes I do admit to cheating a little bit. But that’s the first tool. The Grow or Shrink Canvas to Fit tool.

The second tool is a very straightforward one, Crop to Remove Background. All that happens in this one is that it avoids the problem of the gaps and the need to fill them in by getting rid of them.

It basically crops the picture, which actually then makes the picture smaller. I’ve selected that tool. Let me draw my line and look carefully at what happens when I release the mouse.

It rotates and we have no gaps but the picture is smaller. We’ve lost bits of picture. We haven’t gained any fake bits of picture. We’ve lost some real bits of picture. That’s a very straightforward option, but as I say the resulting image is smaller.

Now, what the third option does is to rotate according to the horizontal line that we’ve defined. But then it just crops off the extra bits of a picture and it leaves the picture at its original size.

So, let me just demonstrate that.

I’ve got the option selected. Let me draw the line. As you can see it’s just done the crop. We’ve lost the picture, we’ve got the gaps. This is very much the same as happened in the simple rotation that I did earlier on.

With this, you, have the Autofill Edges option. Let me just demonstrate that. I’ll do an Undo, check Autofill Edges, once again draw a new horizontal line, and this time it once again uses its intelligence to fill in the gaps that would otherwise result. But we do finish up with a picture of the original size.

And note that in this case because it hasn’t made the picture bigger. I haven’t got that duplicated feature on the right there. So in many ways, this is a bit of a better job really. So, there you are. Three tool options to choose from. Now, let me undo that one more time.

I just need to tell you about a couple of other straightening options. I did briefly mention these earlier on in the course, although I didn’t discuss what they were for.

On the Image menu, there is a third section under Rotate, Straighten and Crop Image, Straighten Image. These are the fully automated straightening tools.

You don’t have to draw a line. You click on Straighten Image, for example. PSE looks at the image and tries to work out what should be horizontal that isn’t or what should be vertical and isn’t and it straightens the image itself.

My experience of these in the past has generally not been particularly good. I have found that if you have something that very definitely should be a horizontal line or very definitely should be a vertical line, perhaps the size of a building or horizon or something, then it can do a reasonable job.

I’ll leave you to try those. It may be that if you have a suitable picture, they’ll be able to help you out. But on this occasion, I don’t think they’re going to help us with the church.

That’s the end of this of this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

Adam Lacey

Adam Lacey is an Excel enthusiast and online learning expert. He combines these two passions at Simon Sez IT where he wears a number of different hats. When Adam isn't fretting about site traffic or Pivot Tables, you'll find him on the tennis court or in the kitchen cooking up a storm.