DIY Photography

Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time

  • News
  • Inspiration
  • Reviews
  • Tutorials
  • DIY
  • Gear
Search

Submit A Story

My Sea Is Dripping? Photoshop To The Rescue

Aug 1, 2007 by Udi Tirosh Leave a Comment

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

HorizonAllot of times you’ll look at two very similar pictures, and say "Man, the left picture looks great, the right one is nice, but the left – Man I love it". Eight times out of ten, this difference can be explained by something called rules of composition. There are many such rules, (The Rule of Thirds is one known example, but there are many more). The rules of composition are a set of thumb rules to help the photographer rely on experience gathers in many years of art. (I was trying to avoid the whole "breaking the rules" argument, but feel free to comment) One such rule simply says Keep Your Horizon Straight. It’s a simple rule to follow, just make sure your camera is leveled when you take the shot. If you miss that rule, you’ll sometime hear comments about people falling to the side, or having the sea spilled out of the frame – some persons can not resist this remark. Some of the new DSLR models can help you with this task. Nikon’s D80 (or Nikon’s D70) for example can display a grid on the view finder, and you just need to make sure the horizon aligns with that line. There are also some nifty accessories you can attach to your hot shoe mount if you have one, see this nice gizmo from Hakuba for example.

But leveling the horizon can be sometimes tricky. When you take lots of shot, when you don’t have time to aim well or when you don’t have anything to level against.

There are two solutions for this problem:

  • the first is practice: go to the beach on a sunny day and just take tone of horizon pictures, after some practice, you will find out that your shots are getting more and more leveled. (If anyone asks you why you have 12,000 shots of empty sea on your card, just tell them you thought you saw Nessy – the Loch Ness monster)
  • The second solution involves some Photoshop work. And here is my guide – Un-tilting The Horizon in Six Simple Steps:

Lets start with this picture – obviously tilted. So tilted in fact that it did get the "if you don’t watch it all the sea is going to spill of the right" remark. (you can click this or any of the images to get to a larger flickr image)

tilting sea

Once you have this image loaded in Photoshop, the first step is select the Measure tool. You can do this by clicking and holding the eyedropper tool or by clicking "shift+I" a few times. See the picture below.

Tilting Horizon - mesure tool

The next step is to click anywhere on the horizon, and draw a line using the measure tool. Make sure your line overlaps the horizon. There is not need to cover the entire horizon with this line, but from my experience, the longer your line is the more accurate the results.

Tilting Horizon - 03

The next step is to select the Image -> Rotate Canvas -> Arbitrary command from the menu.

Tilting Horizon - 03

Notice the pop up you get, surprisingly it has the same value as the measure tool info window. This pop up is just begging for you to OK it.

Tilting Horizon - 04

Once you OK this pop up, your image will be magically rotated into a nice leveled position. Alas, you will now have some spare canvas on the sides of your image. I like to crop this using the crop tool. I set the ratio to 2-3, just like the original image had. I then set two guides (you can do this by dragging the white ruler at the top/side) to show me where to start the crop.

Horizon - crop

You can see the end result here. Go over the image with the mouse to see the difference from the initial image.

evened

Now, Go out to the beach and have some fun.

make money by selling your photos

FIND THIS INTERESTING? SHARE IT WITH YOUR FRIENDS!

  • Share
  • Tweet
  • Flipboard
  • WhatsApp

Related posts:

Photographer captures the otherworldly beauty of sea angels floating below the White Sea ice Default ThumbnailAltoids To The Rescue – The Minty Strobe 10 tips to create better animal photos for rescue shelters This guy used a DJI Mavic to rescue a DJI Spark stuck in a tree

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: composition

About Udi Tirosh

Udi Tirosh is an entrepreneur, photography inventor, journalist, educator, and writer based in Israel. With over 25 years of experience in the photo-video industry, Udi has built and sold several photography-related brands. Udi has a double degree in mass media communications and computer science.

« DIY – The Panorama Head El Cheapo!
DIY – Hot Shoe Adapter »

Submit A Story

Get our FREE Lighting Book

DIYP lighting book cover

* download requires newsletter signup
DIYPhotography

Recent Comments

Free Resources

Advanced lighting book

Recent Posts

  • Insta360’s new teaser says they’re entering the gimbal market
  • Users report blurry photos from Samsung Galaxy S23/S23+ cameras
  • Whale with severe scoliosis captured by drone video
  • Photographer builds 11-foot electronic waste skull to show Bitcoin’s impact on climate change
  • Fuji’x April X Summit reported to be cancelled

Alex Baker is a portrait and lifestyle driven photographer based in Valencia, Spain. She works on a range of projects from commercial to fine art and has had work featured in publications such as The Daily Mail, Conde Nast Traveller and El Mundo, and has exhibited work across Europe

Dave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.

John Aldred is a photographer with over 20 years of experience in the portrait and commercial worlds. He is based in Scotland and has been an early adopter - and occasional beta tester - of almost every digital imaging technology in that time. As well as his creative visual work, John uses 3D printing, electronics and programming to create his own photography and filmmaking tools and consults for a number of brands across the industry.

Dunja Djudjic is a multi-talented artist based in Novi Sad, Serbia. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making.

Copyright © DIYPhotography 2006 - 2023 | About | Contact | Advertise | Write for DIYP | Full Disclosure | Privacy Policy