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Call for Help
Premieres: Weekdays - 6pm ET / 3pm PT
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'Call for Help' HOSTS

	Leo Laporte A technology journalist, author and broadcast personality. His specialties lie in computers, the Web, video games, digital music and consumer electronics.
	Amber MacArthur An experienced Web content and usability strategist, Amber is also a tech journalist who specializes in Internet, software, and gadget trends and tips.

Sometimes it can be hard to keep things in perspective. Have you ever taken a photograph of a building, and noticed that the sides lean inward? Or taken a photograph of a room and noticed that the back wall isn't square? Unless these places have some very serious construction issues, I'm guessing that they were, in fact square. So why didn't they turn out that way in your picture? Well, they would have if you had kept the plane of your camera parallel to the plane of your subject. Unfortunately, pleasing composition rarely affords us this luxury. You often need to point the camera up to get the entire building in the frame, or you need to turn the camera sideways slightly to get the best vantage in the room. Any camera movement that takes the camera plane out of parallel with the image plane will create perspective issues. Professional photographers have equipment to deal with these issues, like Perspective Control lenses that raise the front part of the lens vertically instead of tilting the camera back to get the top of the building in. The rest of us have to rely on Photoshop to fix things later.

The first step in fixing perspective is to duplicate your background layer by dragging it's icon in the layers palette onto the new layer icon at the bottom right corner of the palette (the one just to the left of the trash icon). There are two reasons for doing this. First, it gives you a duplicate copy of your original image to fall back on if things go tragically wrong at any point, and second, the perspective command won't work on a background layer.

Once you've duplicated your layer, go to the Edit menu and choose Edit > Transform > Perspective. You'll see control points that have appeared at the corners of your image. Grab one of the top ones and pull it outward (you may have to expand your window, or type F to enter Full screen mode) and you'll see the image distort. Keep playing with the control points until the image seems square. You can call up a grid for reference before you select the Perspective command by choosing View > Show > Grid. For more control over the effect, try using the Distort command instead of Perspective. This lets you move all four corner points independently.

Much the same technique applies for interiors as for buildings. You may find the Distort command more effective, as the perspective shifts can often be in more than one direction.

When you're finished, hit Return (or Enter) and the transformation will be applied. Flatten the image, save it up, and you're done! It really is that easy.

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
www.adobe.com

PRODUCTS SHOWN
Adobe Photoshop CS2

ABOUT THE GUEST
For the past decade Greg has been working with digital images. Through his years of experience he has developed a distinct style of retouching people. His ability to seamlessly composite images from a variety of frames to create the ‘perfect shot', has made him a sought after retoucher by commercial, advertising and fashion photographers. Some of his clients include Flare, Chatelaine, Clin d'Oeil. Greg has maintained long lasting working relationships with many established fashion photographers and up and coming make-up artists and stylists. His photographic and digital talents have combined in CD covers and Dance Posters, where he has done the photography, retouching and layout, taking the project from start to final press.

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