What's Your Perspective?

How To Keep Your Pictures Square And Straight.

Photo by Anders Jildén on Unsplash.

Photography is just a matter of perspective.

If you visit any large city and photograph tall buildings, you quickly understand the problem of perspective. Unless you are about half a mile away (just try that in New York) you have to shoot up and use a wide angle lens to fit it all in. The inevitable result is a building that looks like it's falling backwards. And if you're shooting 2 buildings side by side, it looks like they are going to hug.

And the taller the buildings, the more obvious the effect. Architectural photographers use special lenses that correct for perspective and keep building tops from tipping away in the picture, but that's not possible on the iPhone.

As it happens though, Apple Photos has perspective correction tools in the edit menu that do a really good job. For any photo that isn't taken straight on and square to the structure, you can adjust the building, room, or scene to make it look more "natural" and upright.

You can get to the perspective controls by selecting a photo and choosing the Edit tools.

Tap on the Crop tool. Then the three Perspective tools will show up under the photo. On the Mac, they appear at the top of the adjustment panel. Just play with the vertical, horizontal, and horizon scales until you get the look you want.

Artists can use Perspective Control to get photos of their paintings square for posting online.

A bonus feature of the perspective tool is that it can now adjust videos as well as still photos.

Perspective control is not just for exteriors, a small adjustment on a wide angle interior photo can fix the distortion that happens in close quarters. Interior photos look more natural. Real estate agents and vacation rentals take note!

Perspective control is an essential tool for outstanding iPhone photography of real estate and rental property.

Changing perspective can also be a great creative tool by exaggerating perspective to emphasize height or a feature close to the camera.

The beauty of it all is you can always reset the adjustments at any time and get back to the original photo.

It's just a matter of perspective.