Quick Question

[Nahant]

I have a quick question regarding how to straighten the horizon of a picture. The question is, when I straight out a picture, using Picasa 3, the movement of the picture tends to make my picture very blurry. Is there any way to straighten a picture without screwing up the rest of the picture?

[bigbassloyd]

The only solution I've even found is to shoot it level. :)

Loyd L.

[JRMDC]

There is a mix of issues. First, how many pixels is your camera capturing? I shoot an 8mp camera, am apparently genetically predisposed never to aim a camera level when handheld, and have no problems with image quality upon rotation or other adjustments, particularly perspective control, which I do frequently, most of the time in fact. I have noticed that there are limits, if I crop A LOT and then rotate, I have problems, but the crop has to be A LOT.

Second, your software. I cannot speak for the quality of the rotation formula in Picasa 3, nor do I know what settings it has. I use PS Elements 3 and have no problems - as far as I know it has no settings for rotation (for resizing it does, the default is "bicubic").

[Nahant]

I'm using a 7.1mp camera.

[Freericks]

While I don't know Picasa 3, the main reason this would likely happen is that you have already severely reduced the quality of your image prior to trying to level it. Simply put, you don't have enough pixels left to support the leveling.

I would try leveling first, while the image is still full size and has not had any other manipulation done to it.

If you are doing this already, it may be that either your camera is shooting jpegs that are too small, or you have the software set so that is it is over compressing.

I recently allowed someone to adjust an image of theirs on my software and didn't realize that they had changed some of my settings. Suddenly everything I was working on was coming out very blurry. I finally noticed that by moving a slider on what was locked during resize, they'd made a change that caused all of my images to be severely reduced in quality when I made very simple size adjustments. I wasn't noticing this however until I tried to make other minor changes and those resulted in the images blurring or looking jaggy.

[JRMDC]

While I don't know Picasa 3, the main reason this would likely happen is that you have already severely reduced the quality of your image prior to trying to level it. Simply put, you don't have enough pixels left to support the leveling.

I would try leveling first, while the image is still full size and has not had any other manipulation done to it.

Excellent point, why didn't I think of it? :(

[stlgevo51]

I use Picasa (I just got PS Elements 8 but haven't uploaded it yet) and I had that problem yesterday. I had never had that problem before and I tried again today and it didn't have that problem. Picasa is making me mad because of weird things it does, so I decided to upgrade.

[Freericks]

Software doesn't randomly act differently. The settings must have been different.

That being said, turning it off and turning it on again, can alter your results because something you had clicked on had no reverted to the default.

[stlgevo51]

I don't know what happened. Yesterday, my picture straitened in a different way than normal. I didn't close it yesterday, and today I tried to straighten the exact same picture, and it was back to normal. I don't know what setting there was to change.

As far a quality, the shot yesterday lost a lot of quality while today, almost no quality was lost.

[Joe the Photog]

I shoot an 8mp camera, am apparently genetically predisposed never to aim a camera level when handheld.....
Same here. And there are times when I remember consciously leveling a shot in the field only to come back and find it not level at al. Most times it's less than a degree though. And it almost always leans to the left.

[Freericks]

With a mid-range focal length I'm usually at worst only a degree or so off, unless I was shooting under stressful circumstances, when I can be shockingly off.

When shooting zoomed in however, I'm astonished at how off I can be... so badly that leveling makes the photograph useless because everything gets cropped away sometimes.

[Nahant]

Thanks for the help.

[Chris Z]

I used to use Picassa, before I figured out how to use PS. I did notice that when you rotate in Picassa the image got somewhat blurry, but when saved the image became sharp again. Picassa does some strange stuff and now I wish I never downloaded it.

Whenever I open Picassa, it grabs all the images from my C drive and puts it in its own folder and sometimes automatically turns RAW files into jpeg's. Sometimes it will not revert back to a RAW. What a headache.

Chris Z