Tutorial: Rotating Digital Images

Perhaps you shot an image on your digital camera in portrait format. Or you scanned a photo on your flatbed but had to rotate it on the bed to make it fit. Whatever the cause, your digital image just is not oriented the right direction.

As you have probably noticed already, there are two common ways rectangular images can be oriented. One way is with the camera horizontal, held normally. This is referred to as "landscape" orientation. The other is with the camera twisted 90 degrees. This is referred to as "portrait" orientation. Landscape images look like a piece of paper oriented with the 11 inch sides on the top and bottom, and portrait images look like a piece of paper with the 11 inch sides on the sides. When the computer receives a digital image, on the other hand, it sometimes can display images wrong (depending on the information inside the digital image file telling the computer how to orient the image). This can cause some images to come out rotated. So how do can you fix that?

When images are not rotated correctly, Adobe Photoshop (and nearly every other photo editor) provides an easy solution. If your image is portrait where it should be landscape (or vice versa) you will need to rotate it 90 degrees to the right or left. To do this, go to the "Image" menu, scroll down to the "Rotate Canvas" menu item, and click either "Rotate 90° CW" or "Rotate 90° CCW" (CW and CCW stand for clockwise and counterclockwise respectively.)




Sometimes an image is not just 90° off. When you have an image that is just a few degrees off, you can't fix it by rotating it 90°. Instead, you can use the "Arbitrary..." menu item under the same menus to rotate the image however you want. When you select that menu item it will bring up a dialog box. You can then insert any number into it and select CW or CCW and it will rotate your image that many degrees clockwise or counterclockwise.


When you rotate an image by an amount other than a multiple of 90° the computer adds white space around the edges. Although you may want to keep this extra area, sometimes it is preferable to crop it off. Set a rectangular crop box just inside the white space on all four edges. Although you lose some image data this way, you also eliminate any extra white space around the image.

If you have an image that is upside down, try rotating it 180°. To rotate an image by a fraction of a degree you can use decimal values in the "Arbitrary..." dialog box. Also under the "Rotate Canvas" menu are two other items - Flip Horizontal and Flip Vertical. These can be used to mirror the image.

Always remember: when editing images do not edit your only copy. Make a copy of your image before editing so that if you make errors you can revert to a backup and your image is not lost.

Questions on these procedures? Please let us know.