In this episode, I show you how to fix the angle perspective that is very common in smartphone photography. It is one of those visual clues that indicate tt the photo was captured on a smartphone!

What is angle perspective distortion?

As objects become further away, they appear smaller. You have seen those roads or train track photos highlighting the converging lines. This is even more emphasized when you shoot from a lower angle! Another example is standing at the bottom of a building. The ground level is closer to you is super wide. As you look up, the top floors further away from our vantage point begin to narrow. Be careful you don’t fall over if you do this!

Buildings captured at ground level using a smartphone with a built-in wide-angle lens further emphasises this angle distortion. If you want to get really creative, you can stand close and angle the smartphone to shoot upward toward the top of the building. This dramatic emphasis of the building narrowing is referred to as ‘keystoning.’

My two favourite apps for correcting lens distortion is SKRWT. The simple task of correcting or introducing angle distortion is one of my favourites – the free Snapseed app.

Inside the app, go to Tools then Perspective. At the bottom of the screen, you have three icons. The Perspective icon reveals and hides the four tools available: Tilt, Rotate, Scale and Free. As you tap each of these options, an icon appears in the middle of your photo to confirm the mode you selected. How cool are they? Now, tap on Tilt again to reveal the two arrow icons in the middle of your photo.

The second icon at the bottom is the Fill mode that will become clearer when we start playing with this tool. The three options here are Smart, White and Black. Tap on Smart. The third icon at the bottom is Autocorrect. Don’t bother with that one!

Next, place your finger on the photo preview and swipe up and down. Three things happen, the grid overlay now has many more lines to help you align elements in the photo with a straight line – very helpful for straight poles of edges of buildings! The photo stretches to make either the top or bottom of the photo narrow. This counteracts the tapering that occurred at the original capture. The third thing that happens here is even cooler, it magically creates and fills in areas that are not there! It is a process called ‘content-aware fill.’ It looks at the existing content inside the edges of the frame and fills in the missing bits. So cool!! Don’t forget to tap on the tick to confirm you want to apply this adjustment.

Now, swipe left and right to see how you can either correct angle perspective on a horizontal axis. I normally use this for a creative effect than a corrective technique.

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Be passionate, Be creative and Stay curious

- Mike

Read the full article at https://www.smartphonephotographytraining.com/composition/photo-distortion