Lens Distortion: 3 ways to fine tune your lens’ performance

jmeyer | Photography Tips | 03/03/2013 02:00am

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Improve focusing and remove distracting lens distortion from your images with these three tips for getting more precise focus and professional-looking photos.

Improve autofocus
Many cameras allow you to make micro-adjustments to the autofocus of specific lenses, to improve AF accuracy.

You can  also apply corrections to remove vignetting (darkening in the corners of the frame)  and control lens distortion automatically, although these can only be used with in-camera JPEGs and TIFFs, not raw files.

Remove raw distortion
For more control, shoot in raw and correct problems in software, such as Adobe Camera Raw.

This shot has dark corners and seems to bow outwards, which is a typical effect of using wide-angles close up, called barrel distortion.

It’s also not straight.  Each of these problems can be dealt with automatically, or manually.

Apply Lens Correction
These problems can also be fixed using Photoshop’s Lens Correction filter. Again, you can use a database of lenses to apply automatic adjustments, and these are very effective at removing vignetting and reducing distortion.

However, in manual mode, you can also correct skewed images and remove colour fringing.

Posted on Sunday, March 3rd, 2013 at 2:00 am under Photography Tips.