How to Correct Perspective in Paint Shop Pro

When photographing items such as paintings, it can be difficult to get the camera and the item perfectly aligned with one another. The end result is that the perspective of the object looks distorted, which causes the item to look as if it's warped and twisted. If you're trying to sell the item, this can result in lost revenue. Fortunately, these perspective distortions can be corrected in Paint Shop Pro.

Instructions

1. 

   Photograph your item. Preferably, the pictures should be taken out of doors in bright direct sunlight when the sun is not at its zenith. Try placing a background behind your painting. This will make editing your image easier when you import it into Paint Shop Pro.

2. Open your raw photograph in Paint Shop Pro. In the toolbar, click on the perspective tool, which looks like a polygon. A box with smaller boxes at the corners will appear over the image. Click each small box and drag it to the corner of your object. Zoom in using the magnifying glass tool or by rolling the scroll wheel on your mouse. Make sure that the lines of the box are exactly on the edge of the object.

3. 

   Click the blue check mark in the Tool Options Palette. This will correct the perspective of the image.

4. 

   Click on Adjust > Lens Correction. Most images with perspective distortion have fisheye distortion, so let's click on the Fisheye Distortion Correction Tool. Click on the minus button in the dialogue box to zoom out. Adjust the Field of View of the distortion correction, checking in the preview window to see if the desired effect has been achieved. Click the Proof button, which looks like an eye. This will cause your corrections to appear in the image window. Once you have the amount of correction you need, click on the OK button.

5. 

   Crop your image by selecting the crop tool in the toolbar. If you do not crop it closely, you may need to edit out background details and replace them with a solid color. You can do this easily either with the Line Tool. Place the Line Tool at the edges of the object, then adjust the small boxes at the ends so that the line perfectly borders the object. Then use the Fill Tool to remove the rest of the background. When editing out background details, its best to keep the background area small and use black or white as the background color.

6. 

   Correct the Brightness and Contrast and the Color Balance, if necessary. Save your image with a new file name to preserve the original image for later use.

Tips & Warnings

• Experiment with different settings in the various Paint Shop Pro tools to see which ones look best.

• Save your image at each step to to avoid losing your work.

• Take multiple pictures of your object before importing into Paint Shop Pro.