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 into File, Save As, and we'll save it as a Fisheye dash adjusted and 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 Mailbox Original and 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 and select 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 some of the bowing of these 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 as 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 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 often 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. We bring it up just a little bit we'll see that this gives us a more consistent brick color across. The midpoint also refers to where the midpoint of our image is and how drawn out it is for the vignetting.
We'll drag it just to the left a little and we can see it spreads out the lightness of the vignetting. 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 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 space. 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 change 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 further so we're more straight on to the mailbox. Finally we can adjust the angle for our image by dragging just to the right of the angle and it will rotate it 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. We drag it out however we want to drag it forward so we start to lose some of the distortion in the corners. I'm going to drag it to the right just a little bit to about 114 percent 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 a lot better 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!