Lens Distortion

Last week I blogged about one of my favorite lenses, the Canon 16 – 35.  It’s a great lens, but like with any wide angle lens you will get a bit of lens distortion on the edges.  Nicole asked if I had ever tried the lens distortion tool while editing, but I hadn’t.  I didn’t even know if Photoshop had one!

Flash forward to this past weekend.  The good people at Adobe were kind enough to send me a copy of Adobe Lightroom Photoshop 3 to try out for myself.  As it was loading I was reading about all the new features and one of those features was a lens distortion tool.  It’s super awesome because you simply pick what lens you were using and it is fixed automatically.  The have most Canon, Nikon, and Sigma wide angle lenses to choose from as well as a couple of Sony and Tamron lenses.

Here is the original image taken with the Canon 16 – 35 2.8:

Here is the corrected image:

The change is subtle, but I think it looks great!  You can really see the difference when you look at the block wall in the background.  See how on the original image it curves up on the sides (on the top and bottom of the wall).  On the corrected image it’s just a straight line.  Pretty cool and it was so easy!

I’ll be doing a full review on Lightroom when I get to know how to use it and work it into my work flow.  But, I am really impressed.  Especially with the noise reduction.  Wow!  It’s amazing!