Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Ever shoot some buildings downtown and they look like they're leaning back?
Or maybe the top of the building looks wider than the bottom. These types
of lens distortions are really pretty common, but in early versions of Lightroom,
to fix these types of problems you had to jump over to Photoshop and manually
try to tweak your image there. Luckily, Lightroom 4 can not only fix your lens
distortion problem, it can often do it automatically (but of course, you can
do it manually if you want to, or if your lens isn't supported).
Step One:
Open an image that has a lens distortion
problem (by the way, this feature also auto-
matically corrects edge vignetting problems
and chromatic aberrations, as well, which I'll
cover later, but here we're just going to be
focusing on geometric distortion). In this
case, I'm using a photo taken with a 10.5mm
fisheye lens, and while there are third-party
plug-ins you can buy to address the fisheye
distortion caused by the lens, since it's now
built in to Lightroom, we don't have to use
them (wild cheers ensue!). Take a look at
the image shown here, and the rounding
of the stadium (and the lights).
Step Two:
Scroll down to the Lens Corrections
panel. You have two options here at the
top: Profile (it fixes the problem automati-
cally) or Manual (you fix it yourself). We'll
start with the auto method, so click on
Profile, then turn on the checkbox for
Enable Profile Corrections. When you do
this—Bam!—your image is fixed (look at
how it straightened out the image shown
here). It can pull off this mini-miracle be-
cause it reads the EXIF data embedded into
the photo at the moment you took the shot,
so it knows which lens make and model you
used to take the image (Adobe included
lots of camera and lens profiles for popular
Nikon, Canon, Tamron, and Sigma lenses.
Take a look under the Lens Prof ile section
and you'll see your lens' make and model,
and the type of lens profile applied). This
is pretty amazing stuff if you ask me, and
it happens all in a split second.
