Perspective/warp tool

[ravinat]

I took a photo recently of two skyscrapers that are close to each other. I took the photo at 28 mm on my Canon T7i. 

The buildings do not appear straight and I tried to use both the single and dual plane perspective tool and cannot seem to solve the problem. I have attached the image.

The file is 10.9 Mb and uploads are failing. Can you provide me with another method by which I can provide you the file?

 

[firstdefence]

Export a copy of file at a smaller size to upload easier

[toltec]

Use the Mesh Warp Tool to finish off.

Get it as close as you can with the normal Perspective Tool, then use the Mesh Warp Tool.

Double click on the image to add control points. You can do some pretty amazing transformations that way. 

Note: I'm a bit tired and haven't tried very hard to get it straight, but you can see the process and how the nodes are added.

[ravinat]

I have now tried to attach the photo I am trying to set straight.Even with the reduced file size (about 2 mb) it still gives a -200 error and fails.

[firstdefence]

You can try https://imgbb.com/upload and link from there.

[ravinat]

I have completed the upload:

 

https://ibb.co/eVfVNK

[firstdefence]

That was a toughie

I tried the perspective tool but couldn't get a decent adjustment and it just made the image worse, so I resorted to chopping the image up using the pen tool to make selections of the left and right buildings

1. So first off I went to Pixabay to find a clear sky and downloaded it ready to place as a background use the 1920 x 1080 size.
2. Then I started to carefully select around the left building using the Pen Tool
3. Once I had a closed curve I filled it with Black and went to Select > Selection From Layer (so now you should have the marching ants.
4. I selected the background layer and pressed cmd + C to copy then Cmd + V to paste the copied selection to a new layer (Layer: left building)
5. I repeated steps 3 and 4 for the right building (Layer: right building)
6. The middle building I left alone apart from a slight straightening using a vertical guide as a guide, obviously 

 

Ok this is where we building the image up to look more like you used a tilt& shift lense

1. I clicked on the Layer: left building and with the move tool selected dragged out another vertical guide, I started to rotate the building until the right edge of the left building looked parallel with the guide (Tip: place the vertical guide on the right edge of the left building about half way down that right edge, then start to level the building up) 
2. Now do the same thing to the Layer: right building but use the left edge to place the guide.

Ok you should now have 3 fairly straight buildings and the image should look an absolute mess lol! time to drop in the sky.

1. Drag the sky you downloaded from pixabay into the image workspace and place it above the background layer but below the left and right building layers, this will cover the centre building but don't panic we'll be erasing the sky over that in step 2. Also place the top left of the sky image at the top left of the image we are working on. See how my image looks in the screen grab
2. Hi I'm step 2.  Press E to select the erase tool and choose a brush size of 300px and a hardness of 0% now delete enough of the sky image to reveal the centre building.
3. You're doing great... keep it up we're almost done
4. Now we need to adjust the background layer to try and match the sky colour of the New sky, I used the Selective colour adjustment, I selected Blues, unchecked relative and set the colours too:
   1. Cyan: 59%
   2. Magenta: -10%
   3. Yellow: -100%
   4. Black: 100%
5. Now you need to crop the image as tight as you can to remove any transparent space, or try to clone or patch those area's to make the image look complete.

I cropped the image and did some cloning on the bottom left corner building (make sure you use the right layer when cloning.

The building don't look parallel but that's an optical illusion, I assure you they are vertically parallel, you might want to compensate for the visual illusion.

 

 

Toronto_28.afphoto

[ravinat]

Wow, thanks for going through such detailed problem solving. That separates you from the likes of Adobe.

I will pull the afphoto file down and use your note to understand the steps more clearly.

Somehow, under many conditions, I am unable to take advantage of the warp/perspective tool. Is there general guidance on the sweet spots for these tools? New users like me get frustrated when we presume that the tool will fix a certain kind of problem.

Also, why does this happen? I used the standard Canon kit lens and why should it record the seen so crookedly in the first place? I tried several post processing lens correction options and they did not help.