Super wide-angle lenses can expand the field of vision in your images, but they often come with an unwanted side effect — lens distortion. The good news is distortion can easily be fixed in Photoshop with this tool.
As Unmesh Dinda demonstrates in this quick tutorial from PiXimperfect, the adaptive wide angle filter is a powerful tool for eliminating the distortion created by fisheye and other wide-angle lenses. Simply clicking and dragging the tool along the curved edges of distorted lines will straighten them out. You can then adjust the as necessary to achieve the desired effect.
Of course, this will lead to some areas of the image that are unfilled white space. The image can then be cropped down to eliminate that white space, or you can use the content aware fill tool to fill in the gaps.
This technique is particularly useful in real estate photography, where wide angle lenses are necessary to capture as much of a property as possible despite often tight quarters, and street photography, where city buildings will often distort as they stretch high to the top of the frame.
Have you used the adaptive wide angle filter to adjust your photos? Let us know your tips and tricks for eliminating distortion in the comments below.
Mr. Dinda gets better and better every year. His tutorials were always helpful but used to be laden with a bunch of chatter and distractions. Now we get the benefit of his wisdom, with the added plus of his very crisp, well-paced, get-to-the-point delivery.
I'm intrigued enough to see if I can straighten out a panorama mobile photo where the horizon line was too close to the camera creating a pretty extreme bend. I don't really need the photo, but I think it would be a good exercise to help master this technique.
Although sometimes you need to do this, you lose a lot of the FOV of the wide angle lens, so a 20 looks like a 24, etc., which defeats the purpose of using the wide lens to begin with. If you need really wide FOV, better to look into one of the new rectilinear lenses like the Laowa 12mm f/2.8 or the Irix 11mm f/4.0.
Unmesh is the boss! I love his rapid-fire tutorials.