Your wide-angle shots have the bends? Try these tips
Posted on August 6, 2008
If you do any photography with wide-angle lenses, you’ve probably been frustrated with distortion issues. You take a shot of a tall building and the walls suddenly warp. Don’t worry, it’s not the drugs you did in the 60’s, it’s your lens.
Here are some things I do to reduce the problem.
(1) Whenever possible get the camera high enough so you can get the shot you want with the camera exactly level. This, of course, requires shooting at the vertical midpoint. It isn’t always do-able but it will eliminate most of the distortion - especially the vertical distortion. As soon as you tilt the camera up parallel lines “v out” like this: \ /, point it down they go the other way.
(2) Try to keep your camera exactly perpendicular to the scene. This will help to avoid horizontal distortion.
(3) A lot of distortion can be corrected in Photoshop. Go to filters/distortion/lens correction. It has great controls that are pretty good at mimicking the results you’d get using tilts and swings on a 4×5 camera.
(4) Sometimes you get distortion on just one side of your photo. When this happens, the regular lens correction in Photoshop doesn’t help much. Try the Edit/transform/distort tool. It allows you to tweak just one side of the image.
(5) You may occasionally notice a bending of parallel lines either outward like this: ( ) or inward like this: ) (. Photoshop has an adjustment for this too. If you have to use it, keep an eye on the vertical and horizontal settings, you may have to readjust them.
(6) If you are having severe distortion that will require a lot of adjusting in Photoshop, be sure to shoot your scene with extra space around the area you want to crop. You can lose a lot of your image because you have to crop in to avoid the white space created by the Photoshop adjustments.
I hope these tips help you get rid of “the bends.”
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