It’s always worth checking your horizon is level when you’re taking landscape photos but sometimes we forget to check or get it slightly off. This indispensible little Photoshop trick will straighten up your horizons in no time.

We’ll start with this very wonky photo by faeryboots…

level horizons

Clearly a horizon this wonky is intentional but it gives us a nice example for this tip.level-horizons-2

The first thing we need to do is select Photoshop’s Ruler tool. It’s slightly hidden in the toolbar but if you click and hold on the eyedropper tool, you can select it from the menu that appears. As a shortcut you can press Shift+I until it’s selected. Use the Ruler tool to draw a line along the horizon as below and then (here’s the nifty bit) from the Image menu select Rotate Canvas and then Arbitrary… and you’ll notice that in the dialog box that pops up Photoshop has already filled in the amount you need to rotate the image by in order to restore the horizon to horizontal.

level horizons 4

All you have to do now is OK that dialog and Photoshop has taken all the hard work out of getting your levelling your horizon back to horizontal.

level-horizons-5

All that’s left to do is crop to your final image.