Owners of print photographs aren’t the only ones who sometimes need a little help straightening their pictures. Digital photos sometimes have to be rotated because some cameras don’t include data in their image files that tells Elements (or any other image-editing program) the correct orientation. Certain cameras, for example, send portrait-oriented photos out on their sides, and it’s up to you to straighten things out.
Figure 3-2. Sometimes Elements just can’t figure out how to split photos, and you wind up with something like these two not-quite-separated images. If that happens to you, rescan the photos that confused Elements, but this time make sure they’re more crooked on the scanner and leave more space between them. Elements should then be able to split them correctly. Also, check for positioning problems like you see here, where Elements can’t split the photos because it can’t draw a straight line to divide these two without chopping off the corners. Put a little more space between the photos so Elements can split ’em.
Fortunately, Elements has rotation commands all over the place. If you need to do is get Dad off his back and stand him upright, here’s a list of where you can perform a quick 90-degree rotation on any open photo:
Quick Fix (Adding Canvas). Click either of the Rotation buttons at the bottom of the preview area.
Full Edit. Go to Image→Rotate→90° Left (or 90° Right).
Project bin. Right-click a thumbnail and choose Rotate 90° Left (or 90° Right).
Raw Converter (The Raw Converter). Click the left or right arrow at the top of the Preview window.
Organizer. You can rotate a photo almost any time in the Organizer by pressing Ctrl/⌘ plus the left or right arrow key. Another option is to choose Edit→Rotate 90° Left (or 90° Right). There are also Rotate buttons at the top of the Quick Edit panel in Full Screen view (Full Screen view). Finally, there’s a pair of Rotate buttons at the top of the Media Browser window.
Those commands all get you one-click, 90-degree changes. But Elements has all sorts of other rotational tricks up its sleeve, as the next section explains.
Elements gives you several ways to change your photo’s orientation. To see what’s available, in the Editor, go to Image→Rotate. You’ll notice two groups of rotate commands in this menu; for now, it’s the top group you want to focus on. (The second group does the same things, only those commands work on layers, which are explained in Chapter 6.) The first group of commands includes:
90° Left or Right. These commands do the same thing as the rotate buttons explained earlier; use them to fix digital photos that arrive in Elements on their sides.
Custom. Selecting this command brings up a dialog box where, if you’re mathematically inclined, you can type in the precise number of degrees you want to rotate the photo.
Flip Horizontal. Flipping a photo horizontally means that if your subject was gazing soulfully off to the left, now she’s gazing soulfully off to the right.
Flip Vertical. This command turns your photo upside down without changing the left/right orientation the way Rotate 180° does.
Tip
When you’re flipping photos around, remember you’re making a mirror image of everything in the photo. So someone who’s writing right-handed becomes a lefty, any text in the photo will be backward, and so on.
Figure 3-3 shows these commands in action.
Figure 3-3. Use the rotate commands to send this otter tumbling. Top row (left to right): The original, the photo rotated 90 degrees to the right, and the photo rotated 180 degrees. Bottom row: The photo flipped horizontally (left) and vertically (right).
If you want to position your photo at an angle (as you might in a scrapbook), use Free Rotate Layer, described on Free Rotate Layer.