crooked composition - can it be saved?

[megkunert]

I did my very first newborn shoot yesterday.. I love this photo, but I could not get my camera straight AT ALL. I know there is probably a tool to help me fix this (any recommendations?) but in the meantime, is there something I can do in CS5 to make it look straighter?



thanks in advance!
Meg

[dlambert]

Well, let's see... yes, there's a straighten tool that'll let you rotate the whole photo around a point, but I think that the chair itself would end up looking crooked then. You could also adjust the lines where the floor meet the wall to make those appear straight. This wouldn't be too hard, since you've just got those two lines on the far left and far right. You'd have to take care that the lines were still straight with respect to one another once you're done, but all-in-all, that's not super-difficult in PS.

I think the bigger question might be how much "straightness" you want at all. Given that this is a pretty simple composition, I think a little angle in the background really might not be all that bad... it helps create a little bit of interest, I think. That part's pretty subjective, though, and there's certainly no harm playing around with the photo to see if you like it better when it's straightened.

[LeeR]

Call me a sentimental old fool but I love photos of newborns. Perhaps it is because I am at the age where my children are producing them at a staggering rate (images, not babies) but these shots of tiny naked infants are just adorable.
While I agree with dlambert that the slight angle is not all that bad, once you notice it you get the feeling the baby may slide off at any moment. I used the straighten tool in ACR to straighten things out; turns out if you get the rung under the seat straight everything else falls into place. It's not my favorite composition as the line of the floor in the background is terribly distracting. I suspect that if you had lowered your camera a bit more so the floor wasn't in the image you would have had a much better shot.
I have also increased the contrast and saturation on this a bit. That's not easy to do with an image that is slightly overexposed, but this old fool still has a few tricks up his sleeve.

[sinque]

Meg This is a nice picture.
What lense did you use?
You have made some really good photographs
with your D5000.

Karolyn