Perspective adjustment in PSP X2

[rkurp]

Hello,
I am new to PSP, although I have had experience using other imaging software. One of the reasons why I bought PSP X2 were the many photo distortion techniques embedded in the program.

One of these is "perspective adjustment". (I'm back-translating this from the Dutch, so bear with me please if this is not quite the precise term.)

The help file tells me to look for the perspective adjustment tool in the toolbar (vertical, on the left). It should be an icon showing a skewed quadrangle. It isn't there. However, the taskbar (horizontal, on top) shows other, related tools, such as pincushion and barrel distortion. Perspective adjustment is not among those either.

I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, but I don't know what.

Thanks in advance for your help.

R.

[allicorn]

Hiya,

What you're looking for depends on whether you want to add perspective to your image or remove it.

To add perspective effects - which can make an image look like a flat photograph floating at an angle in 3D - you want from the menu Effects -> Geometric -> Horizontal/Vertical Perspective. These two effects will kinda "turn" the image along a horizontal or vertical axis passing over the vanishing point and make the image look somewhat 3D.

To remove perspective effects - there's a tool on the main toolbar which is what I suspect you're looking for. It looks like a kinda squashed square with black dots each corner. It may well be that its not visible by default though - try looking for the "Straighten Tool" (which looks like an angled box between two horizontal lines) and click on the teeny-tiny arrow at the right edge of the box - this ought to produce a small drop-down menu with at least "Straighten" and "Perspective Correction" on it.

With the Perspective Correction tool selected you'll get a floating square of lines shown over your image with a dot (called a "handle") at each corner. Drag the four dots until they line up with the corners of any area of the image that you think really should be square but currently isn't because of perspective distortion. Then press the green circled check icon on the tool options palette. The results are usually terrific!

The ideal example of when the Perspective Correction tool comes in handy is a photo of a painting. Say there's a painting on the wall at a gallery you visit, and you like it and snap a photo but unfortunately you were standing just to the side or you were too low/high and in your resulting photograph the painting doesn't appear square - because of perspective. With the tool selected you'd drag the four dots to each corner of the painting, click the check icon and the painting would magically become square again.

If you really can't find the Perspective Correction tool anywhere at all, its possible that it may not be appearing on your toolbar. You can customize the toolbar by right clicking it and selecting "Customize...". With "Tools" selected in the left list, find "Perspective Correction" in the list on the right side then just drag the icon into a useful position on your toolbar. (I should point out that due to a bug, if you're trying this you must do it immediately after opening PSP and then close PSP immediately afterwards or otherwise the program will forget what you did the next time you start it ).

Hope that helps!
Alli

[rkurp]

Hi Alli,

One lives and learns! Thanks so much for pointing the way.