It's amazing how often photos are crooked. This photo, for example, has an obvious angle on the horizon. If you want to follow along open this image called sandcastle.jpg in the Part 3 lesson two practice folder. It's easy to straighten a crooked photo. Click on the Straighten tool and open Tool Options.

Three icons give you a choice about how you want Photoshop Elements to crop your photo after straightening it. Choose whether you want to grow or shrink the canvas to fit, crop to remove the background, or crop to the original size, meaning you don't crop any of the photo away.

Let's try all three starting with grow or shrink. If you have more than one layer, you'll also want to check Rotate All Layers. Since I only have one layer, it's fine to have that option checked anyway. I'll use a shortcut to zoom in so I can see better: Control plus the Spacebar on Windows or Command plus the Spacebar on a Mac, and click and drag an outline to zoom in, then click and drag a line along the line of the horizon. I'll use a roof over here.

I'll click and drag a line along the roof and then let go of my mouse and Photoshop Elements will straighten the image. But if we press Ctrl zero in Windows or Command zero on a Mac, to fit the desktop, we see that this option fills in around the edges with the color of the background color chip. I'll click on the History panel and click on the original thumbnail to undo that and try the next option, which is remove background. Click and drag along the horizon and let go of the mouse. Photoshop Elements will rotate and crop the photo. And this looks good.

Let's undo that and try the final option which is to use the original size of the photo. I'll click and drag... Let go of my mouse.

Let's go out to full size. And this also leaves white edges. So let's undo and go back to the middle icon: Remove Background. Another option is to use a vertical line. So let's try that. We can click and drag a line in the center of this sandcastle tower and let go of the mouse. So that worked pretty well this time but if you have a choice between a horizon and a vertical line somewhere, usually the horizon is better.

Here's my finished photo. After straightening a crooked photo, be sure to save your photo as an edited version.