Learn how to calibrate your images for lens corrections using Photoshop. This article provides a comprehensive step-by-step guide on how to adjust lens distortions, correct chromatic aberration and vignette, and manipulate vertical and horizontal perspectives in your images.
Key Insights
- The Photoshop Lens Correction filter can be used to automatically or custom correct image distortions, particularly in images that have a fisheye effect. This is done by adjusting the distortion slider to reduce the warped look of the image.
- Chromatic aberration and vignetting, common issues in photography, can also be corrected using Photoshop. While chromatic aberration refers to color tints seen on the edges of images, vignetting pertains to the darkening of corners and edges in photos. Adjusting the vignette slider can help achieve a more consistent color across the image.
- The vertical and horizontal perspective of images can be altered to give the impression of viewing the image from different angles. This is particularly useful for images taken from an incorrect angle or space, allowing for a more natural look after adjustment.
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In this video, we'll be working on calibrating our image for lens corrections. Let's start by opening our file, and in this video, we'll be using the Mailbox Fisheye.jpeg**.
Right away, we'll save our file. Go to File > Save As**, and we'll save it as Fisheye–Adjusted**, as a Photoshop file, and click Save**. The next thing we're going to do is make another layer out of our background, and we'll title this layer Mailbox Adjusted**, and retitle our original layer Mailbox Original**. Finally, we'll lock our Mailbox Original layer and select the Mailbox Adjusted layer. As we can see, looking at this image, it's a little warped and has a fisheye look to it.
We can see that the bricks are bowed a little on the bottom, as well as the wood fence. So let's make changes to this image. To change the lens calibration, we'll next go up to Filter > Lens Correction**.
Because we have some of the details here for our camera model, we can go in and actually do auto correction. We'll first select Sony**, and then the camera model selected is ILCE**, as found in the Camera Model. This will fix some of the details. However, for this lens, we don't actually have the metadata; therefore, we'll have to do some custom correction.
We'll select Custom**, and here we can make some changes to distort our image to a more natural look and help fix some of the bowing in the bricks, as well as the wood panels in the fence. The first thing we'll change is our Distortion**. Dragging it to the right will help reduce some of the fisheye look of this image.
However, as you can see, as it flattens out some of the middle, we start to have some bricks change on the outside. Therefore, it's important to consider how you're adjusting this image. If you drag too far to the right, the edges of the image will be distorted even more. We'll do our best to try and keep these lines straight, and let's leave it at about 29**.
Next, Chromatic Aberration refers to some of the tints that you'll sometimes see on the edges. However, for this image, we don't have that issue, so we'll move on to Vignette**. Vignetting refers to the corners and the edges that are sometimes darker with certain lenses and cameras.
As we can see, they're a little dark right now, so we'll want to lighten them. If we bring it up just a little bit, we'll see that this gives us a more consistent brick color across the image. The Midpoint also refers to where the midpoint of our image is and how drawn out the vignetting is.
We'll drag it just to the left a little, and we can see it spreads out the lightness of the vignetting. The next thing we'll change is our Vertical Perspective**. If we drag it up, we'll see that it looks like we're looking up at the mailbox, and to the left, it looks like we're looking down at the mailbox.
Photoshop will do this transformation to help change images that are not taken from exactly the right angle. However, as you can see, if you have to change it a lot, it looks a little surreal. Therefore, we're just going to change it minimally and move it just to the right a little bit so we're a little more straight on with the mailbox.
Next, we're going to change our Horizontal Perspective and make it look like we're looking from the right just a little bit more so we're more straight on to the mailbox. Finally, we can adjust the Angle of our image by dragging just to the right of the angle slider, and it will rotate the image to the right or left. It's relatively straight now; however, we'll drag it just a little bit to the right. And finally, our Scale**.
Our Scale will show us how much of the distortion has changed. If we drag it out, we’ll see more of the canvas, but we want to drag it forward so we reduce some of the distortion in the corners. I'm going to drag it to the right just a little bit to about 114%**, and we'll click OK**.
As we can see by toggling the visibility, we've made drastic improvements to this image, and a lot of the lines are much straighter than when we originally took this photo. Let's save our photo using CTRL + S on the keyboard and click OK**. In the next video, we'll be working with black and white filters.
See you there!