Improve Your Photos With The Lightroom Straighten Tool

This post may contain affiliate links which may give us a commission at no additional cost to you.

Lightroom is a great editing program that is so easy to learn and powerful at the same time. Today, I want to talk about a little known tool in Lightroom that can easily help you to improve your photos. Have you ever taken a great photo and then noticed that your photo is tilted? Leaning to the side? I have! A quick and easy way to fix this is with the Lightroom Straighten Tool.

Photo Editing | Learn how to use the Lightroom straightening tool to edit your photos | photography tips

How To Use The Lightroom Straighten Tool

Take this photo.

Boy swinging in summertime

I love it. It’s my son, swinging on his own. It’s the perfect childhood memory! Except the sidewalk is crooked behind him. And it’s distracting.

There was a time when I would have A: thrown this photo out or B: just posted it anyway.

BUT, there is a quick and easy way to fix this with the Lightroom Straighten Tool.

Here is my photo in my Lightroom workspace:

Using the Lightroom straighten tool to fix crooked backgrounds in your photos.

On the right hand side, there is the Basic Panel where you have the Crop Overlay Tool.

Click on the crop overlay tool and it brings up a grid. Here, almost hidden, is the Lightroom Straighten Tool.

The Lightroom Straighten Tool is hidden in the crop overlay.

Click on the angle and drag the angle slider left or right ( clockwise or counter clockwise) until you get your photo, horizon or sidewalk straight.

Caution: This will also crop your photo, so be careful!
(In this case that wasn’t a bad thing, I cropped my husband’s shoe out!)

And here is the final result:

Little Boy Swinging

The Lightroom Straighten Tool is one of the quickest, easiest ways to improve your photos without doing a lot of editing in Lightroom.

This is a great tool to use in Landscape photography, when you don’t have a tripod, or just when you happen to always bend from the waist like me to get photos like this from below. I can’t even BEGIN to tell you how many times I have used this tool on my own photos!

Photo Editing | Learn how to use the Lightroom straighten tool to fix the background of your photos.

Happy Editing!

About the Author
Latest Posts

About LaShawn Wiltz

LaShawn is a mom, wife, photographer, writer, coffee addict and curator of the beauty in her everyday life. She loves to share her photos and tips for creating beautiful photos on her blog Everyday Eyecandy. You can find her as lashawnwiltz on Instgram sharing her everyday eyecandy and on Facebook and Twitter talking about it!