Today’s Question: I have some images of a seascape, and my horizon always looks off. It’s almost like I can’t “snap” it into place. Even the Auto or Level doesn’t get it quite right. I’m wondering if there was a keyboard shortcut to rotate just a smidge, or a pixel?
Tim’s Quick Answer: Yes, you can nudge the rotation when cropping by clicking the mouse in the Angle field and pressing the up or down arrow keys to rotate one-tenth of a degree at a time.
More Detail: When cropping in Lightroom Classic or Camera Raw you have several options for adjusting the rotation of the image, such as to straighten a crooked horizon. Those include dragging your mouse just outside the crop box, clicking the Auto button in Lightroom Classic, using the Straighten tool (the bubble level icon), or entering a manual value in the Angle field.
One of the great tricks for fine-tuning almost any adjustment in Lightroom Classic or Camera Raw is to use the arrow keys to increase or decrease the numeric value associated with the adjustment, which includes the Angle field for rotating while cropping.
You can click the mouse on the textbox to activate the field, and then use the up and down arrow keys on the keyboard to increase or decrease the value, respectively. In the case of the Angle field the up arrow will rotate clockwise by one-tenth of a degree, and the down arrow will rotate counter-clockwise by one-tenth of a degree.
If you initially need a stronger adjustment, you can hold the Shift key while pressing the up or down arrow keys, which will rotate by one-half a degree for each press of the key.
Note that this same behavior is available for the other textboxes associated with adjustments, such as for the many adjustment sliders. In most cases the up and down arrow keys will adjust the value by one, and holding the Shift key will cause the up and down arrow keys to adjust the value by ten. However, the actual result will vary among some of the adjustments.
