23 September 2012

Is it cheating? Straightening a warped quilt

A wonky quilt - at least so it seems, in the photograph
These instructions use the full version of Photoshop on a PC. Hilary gave me a demo of how easy it is to un-warp a wonky quilt (but see the sting-in-the-tail below...). Apologies for not adding arrows to point to the part of the screen being discussed - this is something I still need to learn how to do ... Hopefully by clicking on the images to enlarge them, you can see what's going on -
Select "Show Grids" (via the "view extras" square at centre of top menu bar), then "Select All" (ctrl-A)
the location of the "view extras" option
In the Edit menu, choose Transform - Warp
At this point you may want to enlarge the image to see the grid lines better - hold down the Alt key and use the scroll button on the mouse.
Little "handles" appear on each side - click on them and  pull out as needed
The corners are handles too - and you may need to pull in as well as out.
When your quilt looks square on the grid, click on the arrow towards the right of the second row of menu bars
Use the Crop tool (from the toolbar on left) to trim off unnecessary background
When trimming the background, make sure the quilt's border isn't cut off - top left on the quilt below is too close for comfort! - 
After - almost as square as in real life
"Prevention is better than cure" - it would have been easier to check that it was lying flat in the first place!

2 comments:

Cate Rose said...

No, it's definitely not cheating. It merely corrects for operator error at some point in the design/photograph process. I do this often for photos of my collages (and occasionally quilts) because I can't get the proper angle when I photograph them. I'm just glad you can correct these things in PS!

Plum Cox said...

I didn't know that I could do this - great sharing of knowledge, thank you!
Now, if you could just make it take just a few clicks to get my quilts actually lie flat, that would be even better!