What Photoshop Can Fix #2

Correcting slight parallax

Sometimes the ideal camera placement isn't possible, so we make do and fix the result in post. That's the lesson from a recent twilight shoot with Annette Sievert of Coldwell Banker Valley Brokers. Our subject was 4,000 square foot home in Corvallis and Annette had chosen straight on towards the front door for her preferred composition. But the best spot directly across the street was blocked by a large tree. After some scouting in the neighbor’s yard, Annette and I found a suitable location with an unobstructed view of the subject’s front doors. But instead of straight on, this composition turned the camera slightly to the right towards the home, creating a shallow angle. Now the house looked slightly out of proportion, like the roofline was slanting downwards.

The technical term for this distortion is “parallax”, which means the direction of the subject appears different when viewed from an angle. Or to put it another way, the end of the house furthest away from the camera appears to be smaller. Most viewers accept the parallax from an angle like 45 degrees because the horizontal lines in the image slant towards each other in an equal fashion as they converge. But when the camera is slightly turned away from a subject the convergence isn't as obvious. Viewers notice something is a bit off.

The solution is to fix the parallax with Photoshop, using a filter which evens out the perspective to appear as if it were straight-on. Click through the slideshow below to see the change (hover for controls).