If you poke around in Photoshop, you may have run across the filter > correct camera distortion area. You can use this to correct unintentional distortion, enhance intentional distortion or create distortion in the first place.
Not all lenses are meant for the same things. Wide angles aren’t good for portraits, especially not up close. The distortion which happens is called ‘barrel distortion’ and it’s kind of like seeing PeeWee Herman through the peephole in the door.
Barrel distortion is fab if you want to do something zany like the portraits in this post. For portraits like these, you can use a prime lens and get up close as possible (if your camera has a hard time focusing, you’re too close). If you’re using a zoom lens, zoom out as wide as possible and get as close as possible for the shot.
Wide angle lenses are intended for landscapes, cityscapes or tight spots like a real estate agent who needs to photograph rooms in a house. This is often a trick employed by agents to make rooms appear larger.
So what about fixing or creating distortion in PS?
Check out this example. In the ‘after’ shot, I intentionally added some more distortion to enhance the barrel effect and the caricature-like qualities of the portrait.
In PS, open an image. Go to filters > correct camera distortion. This is the area you can add/correct vignettes, point of view distortion and lens distortion.
It would be a bit redundant of me to explain what these sliders do because they show you what they do next to the sliders.
I would encourage new photographers who are just starting to look at large amounts of imagery and learning to pick out distortion to try these adjustments on some of your photos. You may be surprised to find that an image was distorted when you didn’t even realise it.
This is a really cool post from Darren Rowse about using wide angle distortion creatively. Love the feet I’m going to try that soon :)
