Improve your (railway) photos with perspective distortion in Adobe Photoshop

3 min readOct 13, 2021

Today I want to show you an easy trick to improve your photos in a few minutes. You probably experienced this, you took a pleasing image, but you cannot align it for your satisfaction while editing. The photos look crooked and not right. Here is how you change this issue.

Step 0: edit your image

Before we can begin the changes, I recommend developing your image inside Lightroom first, but do not crop it for now.

Step 1: Open the image in Photoshop

Now, let’s start with opening the image inside Photoshop. Right-click on the image and choose “Open with …” and select “Photoshop”. Photoshop will open. Accept with “Ok” the prompt.

Step 2: start the perspective distortion tool

Let’s start with the actual work. Click on “Edit” and choose “perspective distortion”.

Step 3: find straight lines inside your image

Sometimes is a bit difficult to find straight lines inside your image. Typically it isn’t good advice to align your photos with the catenary poles because sometimes they’re completely crooked. But, in this case, I chose to align my images anyway with the catenary poles.
After opening the perspective distortion tool, you can draw a box between four points. Good advice is to choose four points far from each other so that Photoshop can correct the perspective accurately.

Step 4: Apply the changes

Until now, we just configured the tool. Let’s apply the correction. By pressing Enter or by clicking “deform”, we enter the manipulation part of the tool. Afterwards, click the three lines next to the “deform” button. Photoshop will align all vertical lines precisely.

When you are happy with the changes, hit enter or click the ok sign button.

Step 4: Crop it

Save the changes and go back to Lightroom. Lightroom will automatically get updated and show you the recently modified image. Sometimes Lightroom will not update, so you have to import or sync your working folder.
Finally, you can crop the image, and you are done!

Compare the two images (and some more examples)

Pro Tip

When shooting your picture, always photograph a bit more than needed. Your camera probably has enough megapixels to allow you to crop in post-production.