Converging lines in photos of buildings and trees are one of those problems that seem minor until you can't unsee them. Lightroom Classic's Transform tool can fix most of them in minutes, and knowing how to use it correctly saves you from spending thousands on specialized glass.
Coming to you from Terry Vander Heiden, this practical video walks through every option inside Lightroom Classic's Transform tool and shows exactly when each one is worth using. Vander Heiden starts with a shot of a building taken with a wide angle lens, the kind where vertical lines lean inward and walls look like they're falling toward each other. He runs through the Auto, Level, Vertical, and Full presets quickly, and the verdict on most of them isn't great. Auto stretches the image awkwardly, Level barely does anything useful, and Vertical overcorrects so aggressively the result looks worse than the original. Full combines all of them, and the result is about what you'd expect.
The option Vander Heiden actually relies on is Guided, which lets you draw two lines directly on the image along edges that should be parallel. Lightroom then adjusts the geometry to make those lines match. It's more hands-on than clicking a preset, but the results are significantly more controlled. One tradeoff worth knowing: the correction almost always introduces transparent areas at the edges of the frame where Lightroom runs out of image data. You have to crop those out, and if you didn't leave enough room when you shot the image, you're going to lose parts of the frame you wanted to keep. Vander Heiden's advice is straightforward: back up when shooting, or go wider, so you have extra space to work with after the correction.
The second half of the video moves to a landscape shot of Yosemite Falls with trees bending inward at the edges, the same optical problem in a completely different context. Vander Heiden first uses Lightroom's Distraction Removal tool to clear out people from the scene before addressing the converging trees with the Guided Transform. The approach is the same as the building shot, but the crop afterward left him short on image data. That's where Photoshop's Generative Expand comes in, using AI to rebuild the missing edges of the frame. It works well enough that the final image reads as natural, though Vander Heiden is upfront that it's a workaround for not leaving enough space in the original shot. He also walks through the individual sliders in the Transform panel, including Vertical, Rotate, Aspect, and Scale, and explains how Aspect in particular can pull back an overcorrection and make the result look less processed. Those details, along with the full step-by-step on both images, are in the video. Check out the video above for the full walkthrough from Vander Heiden.
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