How do I transform/skew/change perspective of a photo

I think you are looking for the straightening tool. There is a video of how to use this tool on Apples site, if you are new to Aperture I would recommend going through these tutorials they are very helpful and will save you a lot of time learning. The link to cropping - straightening tutorial is:

http://www.apple.com/aperture/tutorials/#adjustedit-crop

I don't believe there is such a function in Aperture. With PS, depending upon verions, you should either be able to use Crop to Perspective directly on the JPEG, or if you first create a duplicate layer in PS, then the Transform functions should become available to use on that layer, but not the background layer.

As I understand your issue, the straightening tool may not help.

Ernie

Message was edited by: Ernie Stamper

Neil and others,

I should probably point out a slight error in my earlier post as would regard Crop to Perspective -- I said you could directly apply to the JPEG, but of course if sent to PS as an external editor of Aperture, the format would be either TIFF or PSD. The only way a JPEG would be passed to PS would be to Export as JPEG, and then open with PS.

But it makes no difference to the possibility of using Crop to Perspective, which would probably also do an excellent job of making the needed corrections for your images.

Ernie

Neil,

I would have to test with iPhoto, but I would be concerned that dragging a thumbnail would not result in the use of the full size in image for this editing? I do know that using the Previews in Aperture with the media browser is NOT using the full size images.

All the best.

Ernie

Sorry that this will be too late for "tonight", but I would ask "Is it necessary that they be absolutely "rectangular"? By this, I mean are the prints of a regular geometric pattern where you have keystoning evident, or are they just pictures of people, backgrounds, etc?

I have this situation all the time copying various old family photos and what I have ended up doing in Aperture is to do my best fit making the image, straighten the images one-by-one as an editing step, then going back and cropping one-by-one. The crop in your case would be using a standard 8 x 10 crop for all of them, possibly as a batch process with individual tweaking (realigning)as needed. Other corrections are done and then they are exported as whatever.

I find that I didn't need to take the time to flatten all the images, mess with my glass holder, etc. because once they are cropped, you can't tell the shape of the original. Most old photos have lots of room for cropping and it actually makes them better. I suspect yours may be closer to what you want from the beginning. Anyway, the workflow is very fast that way and accomplishes all I wanted to do.

William,

This is a decision that only Neil can make about his particular images. As I understood him, the images would look a slight bit like shooting up the side of a tall building, but not as dramatic.

Therefore I understood his desire to be to skew the perspective to look like it would have been had the camera lens and image being photographed were perfectly parallel.

In the example of shooting up the side of a tall building, Crop in Perspective is designed to make it appear the camera had been elevated to be equidistant from both the top and bottom of the building and no skewing of the lines of the side of the building. Cropping alone does not do this. See as one example:

http://www.myphotoshoptutorial.com/2008/06/perspective-crop/

Ernie

Right Ernie, just wanted to be sure he was was distinguishing framing from content. If it's content, Aperture can do that pretty well. Bill

The trick to using Crop to Perspective is that you must have something in the content that you know should be perfectly vertical and/or horizontal (but doesn't look that way in the image currently) to align the crop lines. If you don't easily have those, then the way you went about it might not be any less efficient.

Ernie