This is an example of the image that I have in mind. Taken at 24mm with a full frame camera it has considerable distortion. When I try to correct the entire image at once with the perspective tool, I can get the right wing of the house straight but then the lighthouse starts leaning. Someone explained to me once that I need to correct such an image in two steps: first select the lighthouse with the marquee tool, correct it with the Skew tool (or was it Deform?) and put on its own layer. Then repeat the same process with the building and finally blend the two halves together using layer masks. However, I must have forgotten a few critical steps because I cannot get the images to align. Can you point me to a tutorial?
Thanks!.jpg)
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Hi Davescm, I thought that I unserstood the Perspective Warp tutorials but I apparently need to review. I have not been able to duplicate exactly your result 
Good result !
K_Georgiadis wrote:
Hi Davescm, I thought that I unserstood the Perspective Warp tutorials but I apparently need to review. I have not been able to duplicate exactly your result
I was misusing the perspective warp tool. It was designed, and most tutorials show how,to line up two planes around a corner of a building then alter those planes. So although your problem was not quite the same, the principle of treating each plane differently worked for this image as it allows you to split up the image and choose how to distort each section.
As Dag and Trevor said earlier you would not normally correct both vertical and horizontal planes - but just for demo purposes :
In the perspective warp tool switched to Layout ,align grids around the house and the lighthouse and the path
Switch the tool to warp and move the pins to warp each section. It is useful to add some guides (just pull out from the ruler) to help align.
This is all compromise - you have to choose where distortion is acceptable and where you want to correct it. I chose to square up the building and the lighthouse and correct the distortion at the top corner of the lighthouse caused by the wide angle lens.
After accepting the changes use content aware fill to cover the transparent areas
Hope that helps
Dave
Thanks, Dave! Even though I am reassonably happy with what I got, you are tempting me to start all over again 
I took all comments to heart and this is the best result I got so far. I may revisit it again some day! Thanks to all who commented!.jpg)
K_Georgiadis wrote:
Yes, it is the Highland Lighthouse in North Truro.
Yes exactly, and lighthouses taper. Plus you are not perfectly square to the buildings, so the roof line shouldn't be parallel to the top and bottom edges of the image.
The biggest problem here is the underexposure. With that out of the way:
Standard procedure in these cases is to correct vertical perspective, but not horizontal. The former looks "natural", but the latter tends to introduce so much secondary distortion that it ends up looking artificially warped (as of course it is).
Circular objects are always a problem because of rectilinear correction in the lens. In order to maintain straight lines, corners are stretched, distorting round objects away from the center of the frame. The wider the angle the worse it gets, and the more geometric correction you apply the worse it gets.
Dave's approach is the best one. But in this case I would leave horizontal perspective alone, just correcting vertical perspective and corner stretching of the lighthouse top.
Just as a worst-case scenario, take a look at this, where perspective is fully corrected in one go. It looks awful, doesn't it...
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