Correcting Fisheye Lens Distortion in Adobe Photoshop

I have an update to yesterday’s post. Because the demo photo I used in that post didn’t do a very good job of describing how the Adaptive Wide Angle filter works, I thought I’d follow up with this one. I have the perfect photo for today’s demonstration so I think everything should be clear from here on out.

If you haven’t read yesterday’s post yet, I encourage you to do so before reading this one. It tells you a good amount of information about the filter in question and you’ll learn a lot from it.

Using the Adaptive Wide Angle Filter in Adobe Photoshop

In today’s post, I’d like to simply show you how the Constraint Tool can effect the distorted curved edges in a photo that was taken with a wide angle or fisheye lens. After all, this is what the Adaptive Wide Angle filter is all about; correcting distortion. Without the Constraint Tool, everything else is somewhat useless. I’ll be working entirely in Adobe Photoshop.

Simply put, the Constraint Tool straightens curved edges. Down below, I’ll demonstrate how to draw a line over a curved edge and how that line corrects the curve. Most of the time, if the lens information is available in the photograph’s metadata, the line that’s drawn will automatically bend with the curved edge. There’s nothing more to do than draw the line. Sometimes though, if the lens information isn’t available to Photoshop, you’ll need to draw the line and then manually bend it to follow the curve. I’ll show you both ways to handle this.

Demo Photo

How’s this for a distorted photo?

As you can see, this photo was taken at a decent angle and with a wide angle lens. This will be perfect to experiment with.

Using the Constraint Tool – Again

I’m going to jump right into the Adaptive Wide Angle filter without giving any explanation as to how I got there because I did all that already. Basically, I’ll just start using the constraint Tool. I’ve already gone ahead and converted the image layer into a Smart Object, so now all I need to do is click on the proper menu item. Once in the Adaptive Wide Angle workspace, I’ll notice that the Correction is already set to Fisheye and that the slider values below that have been set as well. This image has information in its metadata that Photoshop is using, so I don’t need to do anything beyond make sure that these areas are in position.

At this point, since the Constraint Tool is already active, I’ll click and drag a line over one of the curves in the photo. Since this tool corrects distortion, I’ll need to make sure the curve I’m clicking on is supposed to be straight. Obviously, the walkway in front of the store is supposed to be level, so I’ll click and drag a line from one side of the store to the other.

Do you see what happened there? In order for this tool to correct the distortion, in had to pull the bottom of the photo upwards. That’s fine because some of the other corrections I make will let that area fall down a bit. From here, I’ll continue drawing lines over every curve I see. In total, there will probably be about 15 or so lines. Let’s see the result.

Okay, that looks pretty good. The reason the walkway still looks messed up is because I ran out of content. There’s nothing there to work with.

Manually Adjusting Lines

I got lucky in that I didn’t need to manually adjust any of the lines I drew. If the photo didn’t include any metadata though, I would have had to do everything manually. Luckily, it’s easy to bend the straight lines that are drawn. All that needs to be done is a click and drag. I’ll show you how to do that now.

Let’s pretend that I drew a straight line and it stayed straight. To bend it, all I would need to do is click on the center anchor point and drag until the line coincides with the curve I’m interested in correcting. In this example below, I went a bit extreme because I wanted you to see where I clicked and where I dragged the line to.

If I continued on and did this for all the distorted edges, I’d have the same result as above.

The Final Image

When I’m finished with all my line drawing, I’ll click on the OK button in the Adaptive Wide Angle workspace to return to the normal workspace. I’ll then use the Crop Tool to crop out all the empty areas, which will give me the final image that’s much less distorted than the original.

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I hope what I just explained helped further clarify how to use the Adaptive Wide Angle filter in Adobe Photoshop. If you have any questions regarding this post, please let me know in the comment section down below. Thanks for reading!