From the course: Lightroom Classic: Tips and Quick Fixes

How do I remove lens distortion? - Lightroom Tutorial

From the course: Lightroom Classic: Tips and Quick Fixes

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How do I remove lens distortion?

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- Not only can you get distortion from your camera position but even more common is distortion from the lens. Typically speaking wider angle lenses that capture a broader field of view, can lead to distortion. Sometimes it looks like a barrel effect or pin cushion and you might see a little bit of bending at the edges. Some people like this look and even go to fish eye lenses to exaggerate it. But most of the time, it's not desired. Here I have an interior photo taken inside of a museum. And you see a little bit of distortion. I like the angle here and I want to work with it but I want to remove the unnecessary distortion. What we need to do is apply some lens profile corrections here. So, we'll scroll in and take advantage of this. Let's go to the lens correction section, I'll check to enable the profile corrections. Notice what a great change that made. We still have the wide angle feel, but some of the unwanted vignetting the darkening of the edges has been auto-corrected. Plus it was able to recognize the camera and the lens. Now, if for some reason it doesn't, you can click and find lots of options here for different camera models, so you could dig in. Remember, this is tied to the lens itself. Usually this is stored in the metadata for the image. When you shoot a raw file or a JPEG file on the camera raw files are going to work a bit better, it's able to read the lens metadata from the sensor. What happens is, is the lens passes that information on into the file itself. And these corrections can be enabled. Now, if you're using things like an adapter or you've modified a lens, or in some rare situations it might not pass that data off. That's why you can click on these menus and manually choose. In any case, this goes a long way. Now we are free to override this with the manual controls here and you see that it keeps correcting that distortion. Here I really like what that's doing. Additionally, I'm going to come down here to the upright command and just apply vertical upright. Now you see that was really aggressive. Let's try something a little bit gentler here with auto. Now those two things worked great together. I'll turn that off and you see the low angle feel or the corrected feel. If you you're trying to go with something that looks more natural, this tends to work. Notice that you could still address the crop afterwards and refine that if needed. Or if that adjustment was getting a little too aggressive, then you could do this entirely by hand. Just take a look here at these controls. And this is where you could start to tilt the image using the vertical tilt as such to keep the best of both worlds. And then you of course, would need to crop in a little bit just to get beyond those boundaries. And there you see the new composition. In any case, distortion is typically unwanted and it's often caused by multiple issues. The position of the camera, and the choice of lens. And some of the times as I did here, you may need to combine two techniques together to get the quality or the results that you're looking for.

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