From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

Introducing Lens Correction - Photoshop Tutorial

From the course: Photoshop CC 2017 One-on-One: Advanced

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Introducing Lens Correction

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- [Instructor] Alright, so the main project in this project will be to take this photograph, which I captured in the world famous British Museum, for what it's worth. And, even though it's really cool, it's not only crooked, but we have all kinds of distortion associated with these vertical lines. Notice how they bow outward, and we have a similar distortion associated with the horizontal lines, and so, what we're going to do is remove both the distortion, and the false perspective, in order to create this near-perfect effect right here. And we're going to start things off using this command, under the Filter menu, by the name of Lens Correction. Now, we want to apply Lens Correction as an editable smart filter. So the first step needs to be to convert the flat photograph into a smart object. And I'm going to do that by first double-clicking on the background item. Here inside the Layers panel. And I'm going to go ahead and rename this new layer, hieroglyphics. And then I'll click Ok. And next, I'll right-click inside the image window with the rectangular marquee tool, very important. And then choose Convert to Smart Object. Next, I'll go up to the Filter menu, and choose Lens Correction in order to bring up the giant Lens Correction dialog box, which is another one of these plugins that consumes the entire screen. Now, by default, you'll probably see this Geometric Distortion checkbox turned on. You definitely want it to be active. And next, you're going to have to select your make, and model of camera, as well as the model of the lens you were using. Now, in my case, everything's been selected for me in advance, and that's because the Lens Correction filter is automatically grabbing that information from the meta data that's included along with this photo. But if it's not that way for you, then go ahead and manually choose your make of camera from this Camera Make popup menu. And in my case, I want Canon. You can also choose your specific model if you'd like, and for me, that would be this 5D Mark III. But, if I choose that model, then I end up getting a couple of lens that I really didn't work with. So, what I'm going to do instead, is change the model to All. And that way, I'll see a long list of every single model of lens that I can use with these cameras. Now, just so happens that I want this very first lens right here, which happily Photoshop selects automatically for me. Which is this wide angle 17-40mm lens. These last three characters, USM, by the way, stand for ultrasonic motor, which means that the lens auto-focuses silently. Now, if you go ahead and zoom in on the corners of this image, which you can do by Control + clicking, that's a Command + click on the Mac. You can see that we don't have an awful lot of chromatic aberration, that is that separation of the colors. We've crossed the various color channels. However, it's always a good idea to turn that checkbox on, and so, I'll go ahead and select it. And then, I'll zoom back out by pressing Control + 0, or Command + 0 on the Mac. And, notice this darkening around the corners of the image. That's what's known as vignetting. And it's essentially a shadow that's being cast by the lens element. To get rid of it, or at least mitigate the effect, you turn on the vignette checkbox, and that's going to brighten up the colors. In the case of this image, ever so slightly. Alright, now if you want to see a before and after version of the image, you can turn off and on this Preview checkbox, which you can also invoke by pressing the P key. So, in other words, the first time I press the P key, I'll turn the effects of this filter off. If I press the P key again, I will turn the Preview back on. At which point, I'll go ahead and click Ok, in order to apply my effect. Now, so far the correction has been pretty incremental. And you can see that by turning this Smart filter off, by clicking on this eyeball. So, this is the original version of the photograph, and then if I click again, this is the modified version, subject to the automatic corrections applied by the Lens Correction filter. Obviously, that's not enough, which is why we're going to apply further modifications in the very next movie.

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