Shooting with a tilted perspective can achieve amazing results when straightened in Lightroom
I've photographed this old market in London a few times but never managed to get a decent landscape shot featuring the ornate blue ceiling in the centre. Either because the hanging lanterns were getting in the way, or because you have to be fairly close to even see it properly, which makes it quite difficult to capture without shooting diagonally upwards. However, you can use a tilted angle to your advantage by straightening and cropping in Lightroom later. Below I will show you how I transformed my tilted image, which I shot with a 12-24mm wide-angle lens, into a perfectly straight looking image.
❶ Allow plenty of room for cropping
- Try and pre-empt how much of the image you're likely to lose when cropping, and stand far enough back to compensate for that when composing your shot
- In this instance my goal was to crop out the doors at the sides, the lantern at the top, and some of the foreground, hopefully enabling me to straighten everything else perfectly, so I tried to give myself plenty of room to play with
❷ Straightening your image
- Go to the Transform tab
- Select the most suitable straightening tool for your image
- In this instance I selected the Vertical straightening tool
- Use the manual sliders below to make any adjustments if required
❸ Important settings for cropping
- Set the Aspect Ratio to 'Original' so your image keeps its original dimensions
- Ensure the padlock is closed on the right hand side
- Select the Crop & Straighten tool on the left (small rectangular box)
❹ Cropping your image
- Straightening a tilted angle vertically will mean you lose the corners of your image. These corners will be replaced with a blank white area
- Use the Crop & Straighten tool to crop your image so you lose those white corners out by dragging the edges of the grid to where appropriate
- Click 'Done' when you are happy with your crop to see the final result. You can chop and change as much as you like
- As you can see below I've managed to keep the top of the dome in shot as well as lining the bottom of the walls up with the corners
❺ Edit your image
- This really comes down to personal preference. For this shot, I took out some of the shadows, upped the clarity, dropped the highlights, and played around with the colours to adjust the white balance and make certain colours pop such as the blue ceiling in this case
- See my settings below
❻ The final result
I hope you enjoyed my first post. Like with all photography everything comes down to personal preference but I hope this article has been a useful read for some of you. Please leave me a comment below if you have any suggestions to add. Thanks for reading!
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