Herself’s Webtools

How many times have you seen a cool sign somewhere, snapped a picture and come home to find one side is significantly smaller than the other? This is perspective. It tells us things are further away. Usually we only notice it when we look off into a long distance at a road or train tracks. If you take a picture off to the side instead of straight on this effect is magnified in your photo.

You can fix this in your digital photos using Gimp.  Open up a copy of your photo in Gimp. Click on the Perspective Tool.  It is a button that has a square that is stretched at the bottom with two arrows at the bottom. A dot will appear in the middle of your image.  Click on one of the corners you wish to stretch out, an arrow appears, drag it so the line is level.  

In this photo I began with the top left corner and dragged it up until the top line was horizontal.  Then I did the same for the bottom line.  You may have to go back and forth a couple of times.  Once you are happy click the ‘Transform’ button on the pop up perspective window. 

Now that the picture is straight I adjusted the color with Colors->Levels-Auto and then cropped it to size.