Benched on the hot seat: Historic jail in Matamata, New Zealand - Transformations with architecture

What transformations did I make to the original image?

The great thing about playing with architecture images is that you can apply transformations to them without making them look odd - in fact, they may actually benefit from a little stretching.  The above image is a good example.  I applied perspective correction to compensate for the way lines appear to converge over distance and distortion to convert the square building into a more attractive and page-fitting rectangle.  

When applying perspective changes, I will often also distort the object vertically as the former tends to give the resulting image a squashed appearance.  The photo below is a good example of that.  The heritage building in Victoria, BC, was beautiful, but I wanted to compensate for the tilting lines that perspective caused.  Once corrected, the image had that squashed look.  I used the distortion tool to adjust for that and I found the resulting image very appealing.  You can see the before and after results below.

Left:  original image  Right:  image with perspective and distortion changes applied.

Applying such edits to people, animals, and objects that we have certain expectations of in terms of proportions produces abstract and often unsettling images.  However, where there are no such mind-sets, such edits can be attractive.  

I am including a captured image of Photoshop's edit and transform menus.  I have also provided a short statement about the top functions.  I use many of the transform functions in my daily object manipulations to achieve desired results.  If nothing else, they are fun to play with.

Edit menu and transform menus in Photoshop CC 2025.

 Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericspix.com