Lens correction in Photoshop Tutorial

There are a lot of different things that can be done with the Lens Correction Filter in Photoshop. There are automated things like Upright (Upright in Lightroom tutorial here | Guided Upright tutorial here) and lens profile corrections (more corrections here on this video), and then there are things that you can do manually. We will touch on the Auto settings here, but we will concentrate on the manual settings that will work with any image.

Here I have opened an image that was shot with a DJI Phantom drone camera. Notice the fisheye distortion?

Choose Filter>Lens Correction.

Simply turn on the Geometric Distortion option and the Fish eye is removed because the Filter has access to the metadata of the photograph and matches it with presets from the Adobe Lens Correction database of cameras and lenses.

Ok, onto the Manual Lens Correction on a very difficult image

The Lens correction filter is truly amazing, being able to repair all kinds of distortions. Not only can it remedy the bulging created by a wide-angle lens, and the weird distortion created by taking a photo too close to subject – such as the bulging nose of a friend – but it can also straighten images taken at angles and make them appear as if they were shot straight on. To demonstrate, let’s take an image that suffers from many problems, and correct it.

Step 1

Open an affected image and choose Filter>Lens Correction and click on the Custom tab.

Notice the grid that assists us in lining things up, you can also change the size of the grid with the slider to make it match your photo.

Step 2

The first job is to straighten the image. It’s impossible to fix all the other angles if the image is not straight first.

Choose the Straighten tool on the left side of the dialog box

Click-&-drag across the image to define the new horizon. Try to follow a horizontal line in the image if there is one.

Photo straightened with the Straighten tool in the Lens Correction filter

Step 3

The image suffers from keystoning – it’s narrower at the bottom than the top – so we’ll adjust the Vertical Perspective to make the top and bottom the same width.

Vertical Perspective adjusted in Lens Correction to fix keystoning

Adjusting the Horizontal perspective appears to rotate the image through 3D space. What’s really happening is that we’re making one side narrower than the other to combat perspective problems. You can also change the Angle to counter a diagonal distortion.

Adjust the scale slider to see more of the image if necessary.

Step 4

Notice how the image appears to bulge. Move the Remove Distortion slider to the left to ‘bulge out’ and move to the right to ‘pinch in’. This also works by choosing the Remove Distortion tool, which is the topmost tool icon on the left of the Lens Correction window. Once the tool is selected you can drag in the image, although I find that the sliders give you more control.

Step 5

After adjusting the distortion, you may need to go back and again tweak the perspective. The Vertical Perspective has been readjusted to compensate.

Step 6

Click OK to apply.

To finish off the effect, crop the image to suit your needs. As you can see this really is a great tool for fixing distorted images.

Extra Credit

Sometimes when you have been doing heavy lens correction like we have here (or even with the upright adjustment in Camera Raw) you can end up with a skewed effect, almost as if one side has been pushed up and the other side pushed down.

This can be fixed by choosing Ctrl/Cmd+T for Free Transform mode.

Right click and choose Skew. Drag on one side to fix the skewed problem.

Fixing the skew with Free Transform and Skew in Photoshop

And the final result

Final corrected photo of the Empire State Building lobby mural

Note that it was an extreme example to show you the workflow and features in the Lens Correction tool.

Here is a more realistic case.

Original photo of Union Station in Chicago with perspective distortion

Here are the settings inside Lens correction, notice I didn’t use every option, just the ones I needed and I also used much more subtle settings here.

Lens Correction settings used on the Union Station photo