The New Upright Feature in Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom

Adobe has launched their latest update to Lightroom and Photoshop in the 2015.1 update. In the Adobe Camera Raw module and Lightroom, they have developed a new feature that is something photographers in the travel, architecture, and cityscape photography industry will really find useful. It can actually change some of your old previously unusable images into great images.

They have loaded two videos onto their YouTube channel to illustrate how it can be used. It works with two guides that you indicate, and it uses an algorithm to straighten horizontal and vertical "lines" of the image. 

In the past you were able to fix the images in a similar way, but now it has more to offer. When using the upright feature, it will crop some of the original image, but with the content-aware fill it might be able to rectify the missing parts of the image too. The cropped image can also be scaled, so you're not just left with only the cropped image. You can enlarge the canvas to include the white, empty parts too, and correct it as you seem fit.

What I like about this is that images with straightened lines and correct perspective gives a more dramatic result, and is more true to reality.

​If you're a Creative Cloud subscriber, you can download the updates for free.

Wouter du Toit's picture

Wouter is a portrait and street photographer based in Paris, France. He's originally from Cape Town, South Africa. He does image retouching for clients in the beauty and fashion industry and enjoys how technology makes new ways of photography possible.

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16 Comments

One thing to be careful of is that Guided Upright doesn't correct rotation. If your image is rotated, the guided tool will make all the verticals vertical, but will skew your image in order to do so. Make sure you fix rotation issues first, then use the guided tool to straighten your verticals.

Fabulous update.

This feature can also be found in Capture one. It's called keystone

Came here to say this :)

It's a huge feature- i've already used it quite a bit so far and it's been a great addition to LR. (Now if they can only make culling and browsing photos as quick as PhotoMechanic)

That's what we really need!!

Agree. Lightroom is appallingly slow; even compared with CaptureOne.

I thought that as well but I just bought a new macbbook pro with an ssd and Culling and browsing are just as fast as PM was in the latest CC version.

I have a newer macbook pro maxed out for performance and even on a 3 year old HP laptop with i think 4 megs of ram (i had to use it in an emergency recently) photomechanic browsed through the cr2 files as if they were small jpegs. LR on my macbook still runs the race with a decent limp. I have noticed that culling a a bit faster in lr since the last update, but still painfully slow.

I had a go at this just last night and it's been well implemented, I'm a fan.

Hasn't this been in Photoshop for a while now? I guess some people will find it handy, but this strikes me as "meh"...

It has, but no you don't need to leave lightroom and the transformation is non destructive, thats two big thumbs up from me.

Convert your layer to a smart object and it is non-destructive in Photoshop if that is a necessity. Overall, I still say meh.

But you still need to export from Lightroom into photoshop, create the smart layer, do your adjustment, then bring it back into Lightroom, no longer in RAW, and break up your work flow. I can now do it in seconds without leaving LR. When I have 50 or so images to straighten that'll save me about an hour of editing.

Assuming you won't need additional post. Some people will find this really handy, but to me I still say meh.

I love Julieanne Kost - if you ever get a chance to see her in person at WPPI, Imaging USA, etc ... do it!