Crop and straighten a photo in Photoshop

Published on November 18, 2022

How do you crop and straighten a photo?

I’ll show you how to crop and straighten a photo with the perspective crop tool in Adobe Photoshop.

Rather watch the video with instructions? Then click here or scroll down to the end of this page.

Click here if you want to download the photo I used.

Step 1: Crop and straighten photo

Open the photo you want to edit. Then select the perspective crop tool. The perspective crop tool crops an image and corrects distortions caused by perspective.

Create 4 points on the corners of the area you want to crop and straighten. Adjust the corners until the grid aligns with the lines in your photo. Then click on the ✓ icon. Photoshop will now crop and straighten the selected area.

You can see the result below. If you’re happy with the result, you’re done now. I think the face looks a bit stretched, so I want to fix the proportions. In the next step I’ll show you how to do that.

Step 2: Fix proportions

If the background layer is still locked, unlock this layer first (click on the lock icon). Then disconnect the height and the width by clicking on the chain icon.

Press CTRL+T to activate free transform. If you press and hold ALT while moving one of the anchor points, it will evenly change both sides. I moved the top anchor point down while holding ALT and as you can see, it changed the top and the bottom.

You can also move the anchor points on the side, depending on how you want to adjust the proportions. Continue this until your image looks good.

To remove the transparent areas, we’ll use the crop tool. If you press and hold ALT while cropping, you’ll see that it will also crop both sides evenly.