Angled photos and removing distortion

There are times when taking a straight on photo is not possible. I would prefer that the photo be as straight as possible to avoid distortion and insure accuracy but can make adjustments to the photo in Adobe photoshop to compensate. I will attempt to simulate a straight on shot using the crop tool.

Below is a photo provided to me by a customer. As you can see this was shot at an odd angle and tracing it as is is not the best solution. These steps are done in Photoshop CS3 to prepare the file for tracing in Adobe Illustrator.

Distorted photo

Here are the steps to fix this issue…

Drag the crop tool to include all of the desired graphic. Note: make sure that you have clicked/checked on the perspective button to “enable perspective cropping”

Adjust the corner handles to the corners of the area. In this case the 4 corners of the red section of the logo.

Once you are satisfied that the corners are lined up properly just hit enter on your keyboard and then you will have a new image that is now straight in appearance and can be traced properly.

Note: Even though this is now a straight image and better suited for tracing, this is only an approximation. This method now makes all of the sides parallel and perpendicular but does not mean it will be 100% true to the original. There are issues with foreshortening that the filter will not compensate for. This method works when a new photo is not possible. Ideally the artwork to be traced should be photographed straight on for more accuracy

Here is the final result. This is a jpeg preview of the resulting vector file. I stretched it a bit to try to compensate a bit more. It will be up to the customer to measure the space provided to size properly

Jpeg preview of vector