The best and easiest way to line up your photographs in Photoshop CS3 is to use the measure tool. It’s really easy and takes a lot of the guesswork out of adjusting and straightening your images. You will see that Photoshop works quickly and easily straightens almost any photo within seconds. The first thing you need to do is grab the measure tool in the same box as the eye dropper tool. You will need to left click the eye dropper tool and drag your mouse down to the little ruler appears. This is the measuring tool.

The first step to straightening your image is to look for a vertical or horizontal line that you can use as a baseline. Your next step will be to use the measure tool and copy over a horizontal or vertical line. For example, if if you know, that’s the water line is horizontal; drag your reference line in parallel with the current water line. If it’s not very level. Don’t worry, Photoshop will easily fix this. Click okay. Photoshop will then compare the angle of the line drawn to the 0 or 90 degree line and rotate to straighten.

To easily straighten something out, all you have to do is click along the edge of something that should be vertical or horizontal. Piece of cake right? Now look at the options bar at the top and you will see a number. This is the angle of the line you just drew. The options bar should allow you to see the angle of the line you just drew with the measuring tool. Photoshop calculates this angle and findings out how far the image needs to be turned either clockwise or counterclockwise. To automatically rotate canvas choose the arbitrary commands. It’s real funny that they use Photoshop uses the word are arbitrary. Because the real literal translation of arbitrary means chance or by random, and that’s not what we’re doing here. We are not randomly or by chance doing anything during this modification. We use the measuring tool to find out exactly the angle we needed and told Photoshop to rotate. As I’ve always said using Photoshop is much easier than people give it credit for. After you choose the arbitrary selection , Photoshop will open up the rotate Canvas dialog. As we can see all the work as easily done for us. With only two options, either rotate clockwise or rotate counterclockwise. Hopefully you learned that in grade school.

Finally, all we have to do is rotate Canvas by clicking okay and Photoshop will actually straighten the image instantly. Everything will look great. But wait, we seem to have a problem. When we rotated our image, we created some black or white blank spaces on the outside of our image. We will fix this by using the Photoshop cropping tool. Just select the crop tool from the top of the tools palette or you may just want to use the keyboard shortcuts key. Use the crop tool to select the image area that does not incorporate black or white space and we are okay. Problem solved in less than 30 seconds.