Squaring up photo of a painting

[Lorna P]

Hi, I am an artist. I take pictures of my paintings. They need to be squared up - to perfect squares or rectangles. Is there a simple way to do this? I tried converting the photo to a polygon, adding and moving points, stretching out the irregular shape. But after I cropped, it still was not a true rectangle. Thank you for your help.

[acknak]

Greetings and welcome to the community forum!

Hmm ... I think this is a job more suited to an image editing program, something like Gimp or Photoshop, rather than OO Draw.

OO may do part of the job; an image editor will be a lot more powerful & flexible.

[Lorna P]

Thank you! I know it can be done in Photoshop by means of a Marquee rectangle, moving to position and cropping - I just read a blog post on how to do that. But alas, I do not have Photoshop. I appreciate your comments.

[MrProgrammer]

Hi, and welcome to the forum.

GIMP can easily crop an image to any desired dimensions. It is an excellent program. This was developed as an open source project, and it is free. There is a version for windows.

Edit: If the problem is perspective distortion, GIMP's Tools → Transform Tools → Perspective or Tools → Transform Tools → Cage Transform may help. Their forum is GIMP Forums.

If this solved your problem please go to your first post use the Edit button and add [Solved] to the start of the title. You can select the green checkmark icon at the same time.

[keme]

It is probably less work if you avoid perspective distortion from the outset. Make sure that your camera is pointing squarely towards the face of the painting. (the back of your camera and the canvas should be parallel surfaces).

This assumes that you do paintings on canvas, paper or other "loose material". With e.g. wall or pavement paintings I understand that this may be difficult, perhaps impossible in some cases. Tilt/shift lenses may help, but they are rather expensive and take a bit of learning to use them properly.