Perspective Crop Tool weird behaviour

[Art of Walls]

What [cursing removed], Adobe???

It seems something ruined the Prespective Crop Tool pretty bad.

[Srishti Bali]

Hi @Art of Walls

Thanks for flagging this. Could you please share a bit more detail?

• Which Photoshop version are you using? (Help → About Photoshop)

• Windows version 

• Does this happen with a specific file or file type?

• Can you share a short screen recording showing the workflow?

Once we have these details, it’ll be easier to reproduce and investigate the problem.

Regards,

Srishti

[Art of Walls]

Using Photoshop 27.2.0 just updated but also happened with previous version before updating.

The file is a PNG generated by Gemini.

I select the Perspective Crop Tool and mark the four corners of the top of the box (in the first screenshot you can see the selection with the grid).
Hit Enter, the expected result was the art on top of the box straightened. Instead of that I got what you can see in the second screenshot I posted that doesn't make sense with how the tool should perform.

Just to be sure it was not a problem with the file, I opened in the web browser the first attached screenshot, preseed "Print Screen" key and cropped a ramdom piece of the image that includes the original image and some random space around. This copies the selected area to the clipboard. I then created a new file in Photoshop using the clipboard as the size, pasted the clipboard content and repeated the Perspective Crop on this image. Again the same weird result so this issue has nothing to do with the file format of the original image.

Also tried with different images and with cropping diferent areas. Sometimes it happens, sometimes not. It is very obvious when it happens because straight lines become curved and that should never happen with the perspective tool*. I've been unable to determine what are exactly the circumstances that trigger the issue, but I guess it has to do with the shape of the irregular trapezoid.

Also tried with Photoshop Beta 27.3.0 but same issue.

Here is attached the original image for you to try.

* but would be interesting if you are trying to straighten an image that is on a curved surface, such as a poster on a subway tunnel in London or a poster on a round column, but this is something to consider for a future enhancement of the tool.

[Art of Walls]

Affinity Photo 2 and Affinity Studio do the crop perfectly.

[Anshul_Saini · Accepted solution]

Hi @Art of Walls,

Thanks for the detailed follow-up and for sharing the sample files. I’ve tested this internally and can confirm the same behavior you and Semaphoric observed.

Here’s what’s going on and the best way forward:

• Perspective Crop

– The Perspective Crop tool is designed to straighten and crop images based on planar perspective while trimming the canvas.

– In cases where the selected trapezoid is irregular, or the content does not align cleanly to a single flat plane, the tool can produce unexpected distortion, including curved lines.

– This matches what you’re seeing and is consistent across multiple Photoshop versions.

• Perspective Warp (recommended workaround)

– Perspective Warp is better suited for this scenario.

– It works by defining planes first and then correcting perspective without forcing a crop-based transformation.

– As confirmed by Semaphoric and our own testing, Perspective Warp produces the expected straightened result with your example image.

So for now, the recommended approach is to use Perspective Warp for this type of correction. I’ve also passed this comparison and your reproducible example to the product team so they can review whether Perspective Crop should handle this case differently or improve its behavior.

Thanks for taking the time to document this so clearly.

Best regards,

Anshul Saini

[Art of Walls · Accepted solution]

Thank you Anshul.

It is pretty incredible that in my 26 years of Photoshop use and many uses of the Perspective Crop Tool, I never found this issue until now. Maybe until now I used the tool on real perspective distortions and since this was an AI generated image, maybe the distortion seems real but doesn't fit the laws of perspective so the tool finds an unexpected situation , I don't know.

I use it a lot for straightening photos of paintings and it has always worked flawlessly so when this issue happened with this picture, I thought the tool was broken but I see the problem is at least in the 2021 version so it is a sleeper bug. 

Perspective Warp is like going backwards for me so I guess I will be using Affinity Studio for Perspective Croping until the issue is solved.

[Semaphoric · Accepted solution]

I tried it with your screen shot, and got the same results as you, with both Photoshop 2026 and 2021. Perspective Warp, however, worked as expected.