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Save your valuable time by learning how to straighten and crop crooked photos faster using just the crop tool. This is several times faster than doing it the old way (using the ruler tool to measure, rotating the image, then cropping).

Step 1

Open any image with a crooked horizon like the image below.

Step 2

Select the crop tool   from the toolbar. If you want to crop the image so that it retains its aspect ratio and image width and height, click on the Front Image button on the option bar near the top. Otherwise, if don't want to retain the original aspect ratio or if you don't want Photoshop to upscale the image back to the original width and height, leave all the fields in the option bar blank.

Step 3

Drag from the top left to the bottom right to create a bounding box of the entire image.

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Step 4

If you want to preserve the aspect ratio of your image while cropping, hold down the SHIFT key. Then hold down the ALT key (SHIFT+ALT if you want to preserve the aspect ratio), click on one of the corners of the bounding box, and drag towards the center of the image to shrink the bounding box.

Step 5

Move the bounding box so that the bottom middle node meets with somewhere that is supposed to be straight; like the horizon of the image below.

Step 6

Zoom in close to the image then position your mouse outside the bounding box, click and drag to rotate the bouncing box. Rotate the bounding box so that the bottom of the bounding box aligns with any line that is supposed to be straight (ex. the horizon in the image below).

Step 7

Click on the corners of the bounding box and enlarge the box so that it fits the width and height of the image. If you want to preserve the aspect ratio, hold the SHIFT key while resizing.

Final Results

Now you don't have to measure, rotate, and crop to fix crooked photos because you know how to do this all in one step with the crop tool! It only takes seconds to fix a crooked photo with the crop tool.

Before and After