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I love to shoot with wide and ultra-wide lenses. And I just love the Canon 15mm Fish Eye lens that I have. Its an amazing tool to stretch your photographic creativity. The barrelling and the huge depth of field of the fish eye lens often produce images which stand out from the rest.
This picture of the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, the Tallest TWIN Towers in the world, is one of my favourite pictures shot with the Canon Fisheye.
There is an obvious convergence of the tops of the twin towers which is a characteristic of wide angle lenses. This "barrelling" effect is akin to the volksvagen car - you either love it or you hate it. But I'm sure you'll agree that it is slightly "different" Twin Towers picture from the zillions of pictures which zillions of tourists have probably shot of this famous building.
When I posted this picture in POTY last year when POTY was DL (Digital Life), most people commented that I should debarrel the picture. Of course I didn't debarrel it ! I wanted it to look like that. And I kinda liked it this way.
But lets say I did want to debarrel and remove the pin-cushion effect of a wide angle lens. How would I do it?
Well, Photoshop has several tools to do it. You could use the Transform/perspective/skew/distort commands to carefully straighten the towers. Its quite an involved process to stretch and pull and squeeze and stretch again to straighten it with photoshop. It will take a good part of half an hour to do it manually. And when you're finished, the image would have probably degraded significantly from all those shuffling of pixels. But it can be done with Photoshop.
There are many software packages out there that can do it in conjuction with Photoshop, although there are also stand-alone programs. The purists here will say you need not have to do it after you've shot the image. Easier to use those fancy shift and tilt specialist lenses which will remove the convergence at the shooting stage. Yes you can !! But these lenses are terribly expensive, so we poor amateur photographers will have to rely on software.
One very well known software to correct barrelling is PANO TOOLS which is also able to do many other tasks. Pano Tools is a suite of tools for adjusting and correcting panoramas, for fixing distortions caused by wide angle lenses, for changing the viewing angle of an image, for correcting spherical, fisheye, convex mirror, Barrel and pincushion distortions and even for adjusting the red, green and blue channels separately if you wish. Pano tools can also correct vignetting, the light fall off that commonly occurs near the edges of wide angle lenses.
But you know what ??
I've tried to learn how to use Pano Tools, and to this day I still dont know how. I'm writing this post today, to tell you about an extremely good plug in for Photoshop I've discovered, which can correct the barrelling effect of wide angle lenses. It works in conjunction with Pano Tools and the beauty is that you can use it without knowing a single thing about Pano Tools. Its like an interface for Pano Tools ....
Its almost a one-click no-brainer automatic correction tool for de-barrelling and vignetting correction.
Its called PT Lens Plug-in for Photoshop and you can download and install it for FREE.
Although installation was a bit complex, as you have to download, unzip, and copy the PTLens.8BF file into your PS Filters Folder, the Panotools DLL into your Windows /system32 directory, and then your camera profile (mine is profile-CanonSLR.txt) text file into your HD, and you have to tell PS where it is, once you've done that, debarrelling is really a one click affair.
When you download PT Lens Plug in for Photoshop, there is a PDF file in the downloaded package which gives very detailed instructions of what you have to do. You have to download the PT Lens Package and the Profiles Package seperately. The Pano12.dll file is in the PT Lens helper package and you have to copy this file into your C:\windows\system32 directory. It sounds complicated but read the PDF file and all will be revealed.
After installing the plugin, loading an image and calling the PTLens plug in from Photoshop's filter menu for the first time, Photoshop will ask you for the directory/folder where you've put your camera profile. Then PT Lens behaves just like any other filter.
After installing PT Lens plug in, I picked up my Canon 10D, attached the Canon 15mm fisheye to it and shot a picture looking out of my window. My window has squares on it and I thought the bowed squares produced by the fish eye would be ideal to test the capability of the plug in . This is the original picture, size reduced appropriately for web resolution. I simply opened it in Photoshop.
After a slight adjustment for levels, I then invoked PTLens from the filter menu. PT lens then went to work to automatically correct both pincushion/barrel distortion AND vignetting. It did the job in less than 15 seconds on my P4 2.2G with 1 gig of RAM. I then downsized the pictures for web resolution, cropped it a bit and here it is:-
Brilliant. At last a one click way of correcting those pesky barrel distortions produced by wide angle and fish eye lenses. You should try it. I was so impressed that I HAD to share it with everyone here at POTY.
Best of all, its FREE.
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