Pixiq

Photoshop can solve problems that would have been impossible just a few years ago when we all shot film. A case in point is the picture of the beautiful mosaic I took a couple of days ago in the ancient site of Ephesus in Turkey. There is a group of houses that have stunning mosaics that date from the first century A.D., and the modern walkway that tourists use to observe the artwork isn’t positioned to be photographically friendly. Instead of being able to look straight down on the mosaic, which would be ideal, the people in my photo tour and I had to stand on stairs about 15 feet to the side. As a result, the back of the camera (i.e. the plane of the sensor) was oblique to the mosaic on the floor. This caused the rectangular shape of the design to appear skewed, and it looks like a trapezoid complete with a diminishing perspective, as you can see in the original (inverted) image.

The tweaked photo shows the changes I made to make this look as it should. The yellowish color comes from a huge translucent roof put in place to protect the ancient houses from the elements, and the oblique angle from which I had to shoot created an unattractive distortion of the mosaic.

Here are the steps I took in Photoshop to correct these problems.

1. In Adobe Camera Raw, I moved the ‘temperature’ slider toward the blue to mitigate the yellow cast. This totally corrected the color.

2. I opened Image > adjustments > levels and increased the contrast.

3. I opened Image > adjustments > hue/saturation and added saturation to the color.

4. To correct the shape of the rectangle, I used Select > all and then opened Edit > transform > distort. This placed a box around the photograph with handles, and I dragged the corners of the image to distort the trapezoid into the rectangle it should be.

The picture now looks as if we are looking straight down on the floor mosaic from a ladder.

Finally, I used Image > image rotation > 180° to turn the image upside down so it appears right-side up.