Leading lines are powerful because they control the eye movement of the viewer. The classic example you see used a lot is the parallel lines of railway tracks leading your eyes away towards the distant horizon.

However, this is a simple example: few real-life scenes are quite so obliging!

Leading lines as structure

Leading lines have different photo compositional effects, depending on their orientation and direction. Horizontal leading lines induce feelings of restfulness and peace, while vertical leading lines evoke a sense of strength and power. Diagonal lines are more discordant and suggest movement.

It’s argued that the direction of a diagonal line has an effect too, and that a line going from upper left to lower right reflects the direction in which we read pages in the Western hemisphere.

By contrast, a leading line that goes from bottom left to upper right moves in a perpendicular direction and has a much stronger compositional impact.

You can try this out using a shot with a strong diagonal line and flipping it horizontally in your photo editing software to produce two versions that you can compare.

Not all scenes will have a single dominant line that you can exploit. Quite often you’ll be faced with a number of lines, which intersect at different angles.

How are you to make sense of complex scenes like these? As we’ve said before, it’s best to shoot instinctively first of all – framing shots so that they look right – and then analyse them later.

Slight changes in viewpoint can make a big difference to the way that lines in a more complicated scene interact, and it’s often possible to make one much more dominant than the others.

Quite often, though, you’ll be using small changes in position to find the most harmonious interplay between these elements. Leading lines can often provide a kind of structure to your composition, like the skeleton of a skyscraper.

Some of the time, successful composition means finding one strong element and focusing on it. The rest of the time, it’s about finding the perfect balance between conflicting elements, and that’s something you learn best by doing, rather than by theorising.

PAGE 1: Leading lines as structure
PAGE 2: Leading lines to convey movement
PAGE 3: Converging lines
PAGE 4: Tracing lines

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The recent launch of Photoshop CS6 introduced a wealth of exciting and genuinely useful and creative tools. However, one of the most impressive for photographers is the introduction of Photoshop CS6′s Adaptive Wide Angle filter.

This amazingly powerful tool is like the Lens Correction filter on steroids. What makes it so great is the level of control you have in specifying which parts of the image need correction.

Naturally, the Adaptive Wide Angle filter will be a big draw for interior and architectural photographers, especially ones using wide-angle lenses.

Our original image

However, in this tutorial we’re going to use it straighten out the trees in our woodland scene, above. It was shot with an old 20-35mm f/2.8 lens at 20mm with the camera pointing upwards, so there’s plenty of work to do. Let’s see how it works…

01 Edit the RAW file
Open your original image in Adobe Camera Raw (ACR). To tease out detail in the shadows, reduce blown-out highlights and boost the colours, go to the Basic tab and set these values: Exposure +55, Highlights -100, Shadows +50, Blacks +60, Clarity +55 and Vibrance +16.

02 Work smart
Hold down Shift and the Open Image button will change to Open Object. Click this to open the image in Photoshop as a Smart Object. Go to Filter > Adaptive Wide Angle, and change the Correction to Perspective from the drop-down menu. You now need to change the focal length to 20mm.

03 Straighten the trees
Select the Constraint tool from the Tools palette at the top left of the Filter window. Mark out any parts of the image that you want to straighten by specifying a start and end point with the Constraint tool. Hold down Shift to snap to 90° vertical. Be careful, though, because not all the trees are meant to be dead straight.

04 Crop the rough edges
There’s an element of trial and error when marking out the lines, so be prepared to experiment. Mark a horizontal horizon line too. Once you’re happy, click OK. In the main Photoshop window, select the Crop tool from the Tools palette and remove most of the transparent edges that have been left as a result of the distortion.

05 Fill in the missing trees
Make a duplicate layer and rasterise it by going to Layer > Rasterise and selecting Smart Object. Make a rough selection around the transparent corners by using the Lasso tool and then go to Edit > Fill > Content Aware. This should deal with most of the problematic areas in your image. You can also use the Clone tool if necessary.

06 Add the final effects
For the finishing touches on your woodland image, create a Curves Adjustment Layer to tweak the tones and then draw a gentle S-curve to boost the contrast. A Vibrance Adjustment Layer is helpful for boosting the intensity of the colours. These are, of course, re-editable, so you can go back at any time and tweak the settings.

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Digital Camera’s 10-part series ‘Teach Yourself Photoshop’ builds into a complete video reference library. These easy-to-follow video guides will take you on a start-to-finish journey through perfecting your photos in the digital darkroom. In this tutorial, you’ll find out how to remove common lens problems, fixing issues like converging verticals and vignetting. When shooting from a low angle, buildings and structures can often be distorted, discover how to fix them using the Correct Camera Distortion dialogue box, along with removing unwanted vignettes. Click the links to the right and build up the complete collection with each new issue of Digital Camera.