Today’s tip is one that has saved me at least a couple minutes on every photo I’ve used it on… if I multiply all these minutes by the amount of photos I’ve edited, it equals a rather large amount of time saved.

When you’re shooting without a tripod, or on a boat as I was when I took the example photo, there will almost always be a slight angle to some of your horizons. I find that often when I have a niggling feeling of something being wrong with one of my photos, if I check the horizon I discover that it’s slightly tilted. Sometimes only by a degree or so, not enough that it’s obvious, but enough for me to feel that something’s not right.

To fix this problem you can either carefully rotate the photo to the right and left a degree here and there, until it starts to look straight. Or. You can use this very useful little tool to fix it in seconds.

Step One: Take a photo that needs straightening. In this example the waterline is only off kilter by a tiny amount, but it’s enough to make a difference.

Step Two: Many of the tools in Photoshop’s tool panel hide other tools beneath them. The ruler is one of these tucked away ones. To find it, click on the Eyedropper Tool, and hold for a second until the little pop out menu appears. Select the Ruler Tool (third tool from the top).

Step Three: With the ruler tool selected, click and drag along your horizon. There will be a line following where you clicked, with a little “+” on either end. If the line isn’t exactly where you want it, just click and drag the “+”s to tweak it into place.

Step Four: Once you have your horizon selected, go to the image menu in your tool bar. Select Image Rotation, then Arbitrary.

Step Five: Up will pop a little canvas rotation panel. If you ever want to rotate a picture your own amount, as opposed to the default 90 angles they give you in the menu, this panel where you come to do that. You can type any rotation amount into the box, select Clockwise (CW) or Counter Clockwise (CCW), and it will turn it for you.

For our current purposes however, the panel automatically detects the angle of the line you’ve drawn with the ruler tool and selects the exact angle needed to make it exactly horizontal. Just click OK.

The panel will close and the image will rotate to the amount selected.

Step Six: You will now have a nice straight horizon, but with some extra space around the edges where the canvas expanded to fit the rotated corners of the image. Select the Crop Tool and crop these edges off.

Compare before and after:

The ruler tool can also be used to adjust vertical lines in exactly the same way. Just drag the ruler down what you want to mark as the vertical line of your photo, in this case a lamppost, and go through all the steps from Step Four onwards, the same as before.