Lessons

Lesson Info

Photoshop and Lens Correction

Now let's go ahead and minimize this, and we'll open up the exact same photograph, but this time we're gonna use Photoshop's lens correction to try and fix this. Because all of the perspective corrections that are found in Photoshop are under our filter, we're gonna go ahead and change this to a smart object, so that we can have access to those if we ever need to go back to them. So I'm gonna right-click this, and go to Convert to Smart Object, and then go up to Filter, and go up to Lens Correction. So under Lens Correction, there's a lot of different boxes here that we can check, we can tick and check to get everything right and set up for our image, especially using things like the Camera Make, the Camera Model just like we saw in Adobe Camera Raw. Those things still exist in here as well. It's already loading up a lens profile for me, which'll be the Sony 16 to 35 f/2.8 lens So I could turn on and off that vignetting, just like we do in Adobe Camera Raw. It's very similar to the thi...

ngs that you would see in Adobe Camera Raw. If I were to go over to the custom setting here, this is where I can do some more chromatic aberration removal that we didn't see in Adobe Camera Raw. This gives us a red cyan fringe, a green magenta fringe, and a blue yellow fringe, whereas Adobe Camera Raw, I believe, just gives us the green and magenta fringe. We also have our vignetting and our ability to transform down here. So if we were going to transform this image using the custom settings here, we have our vertical perspective correction, which we would then turn like this, which essentially when we go into Adobe Camera Raw and we tell Camera Raw to make our vertical lines more vertical, this is essentially what it's doing. We just get a slider now that gives us the ability to do it rather than waiting to see what Adobe Camera Raw is gonna spit out for us. And again, the horizontal perspective is the same thing, it's gonna be how you shift that horizon on either the left- or right-hand side of the image, and this looks like it blends a little bit right there. And then we we have the scale. I'm gonna pull that scale out again. You can see that when we pull that scale out, we can see all the things we've done to the top of our image are actually making this perspective get fixed. But it's the same concept here. When we pull that scale out, we will have all of the bounds on the outside of the image that we would need to fill in. And the autocorrections didn't quite fix it like we would want it to fix it. So if we go ahead and, here we have our Straighten tool as well, and we have a Remove Distortion tool. So, the Remove Distortion Tool, if we click on the Center of our image, we drag it to the left or to the right, it's going to allow us to fix that barrel distortion that's happening in the image. I'll just do an extreme version here. You can see how it's turning into an orb, it's actually making more distortion than it is fixing any distortion. This would be a manual way for us to correct any barrel distortion that's happening in the image, that say maybe the autocorrection could not fix. And then we have our Level tool, our Straighten tool, and the grid tool. I don't see that doing much of anything here, so let's just. Yeah. Let's see what happens now. Oh, so what the Move Grid tool is doing here is it's basically just giving use a series of guides to help us and assist us with any of the things that we're gonna be doing over here with our custom corrections. So I have a guide here now that tells me that this vertical line that I have right here probably isn't as straight as I thought it was, so if I were to move this over, I'm now basing that off of that. And if I wanna move that guide at any time, I just move this over, and now I can move that over to make sure that that straight line is straight. So just a guide to help us out to make sure that we get our image straight. But again, it's cropping off the bottom of our shadow here, so if we did wanna keep that, we'd have to consider what we're gonna do in Photoshop after we're done with this. If we were to bring this scale down so we could see the outer bounds of the image, just to the bottom of that shadow. So with this perspective at this point, we've got the nice shadow along the bottom. If I were to open this image up in Photoshop, this is set to a smart object, so at any time I could double-click on this and open this image up. Again, because it's a smart filter, just to see what's gonna happen here, maybe we go ahead and click on the smart filter, press B for our Brush tool, and brush in with black on a given area. And you can see that it's pulling in the old image. So we can recover it that way if we needed to also. That just recovers that top area there, and doesn't give us that issue. Now I'll make this brush a little bit smaller, transfer over to white, and then brush that in to resurrect that top area. So instead of having to fill in that area, we're just using the data that was already there before, and because it's a smart object, we have the ability to go into that. Now, because it is a smart object, if at any time we wanted to go back in and change those lens correction settings, we're not stuck with them. We can double-click on the lens corrections, or back into the the lens correction. Now just like we talked about before with Adobe Camera Raw, it has a smart object. In the last lesson, when we double-click on the filter settings, it's not seeing the mask that we made there. So just keep in mind that when we go back out of here and press okay, it's going to have those settings, and then it's going to put the mask on top of it, okay? There is another tool that we have in Photoshop, that is gonna be more of a sledgehammer. Now that was more of like a, I don't know, a mild hammer. The sledgehammer tool for fixing perspective correction is going to be in the Adaptive Wide Angle Perspective Correction. So if I right-click this, I'm gonna turn this into a smart object so I can always go back to it later. Control and Space Bar, right-click, make this a little bit bigger so I can see what's going on here. If I were to drag a ruler in from the side, if you press Command or Control + R, it's gonna turn your rulers on and off. So if I were to drag a ruler from the side to see what a straight line is, this clearly has nothing straight in the vertical area. So if I go up to Filter at this point to straighten this out, I'm gonna go right here to Adaptive Wide Angle Lens Correction. And the Adaptive Wide Angle Lens Correction has a couple different settings in here to try and help you fix maybe a fisheye perspective, or just regular perspective. You can try auto to see if that works, and then you can go to something like Full Spherical, if it was a a full spherical image, but it's not so it won't do it. But the auto by itself is not gonna fix this photograph. Not at all. What we're gonna need to do is we're gonna need to do the tedious process of building the lines on here to tell Photoshop what a straight line is, and how to straighten it. And the reason why they call it adaptive is because as you build this up, the whole image starts adapting what the wide angle perspective is gonna be as you start adding more lines and building up and building up and building up. So if I click right here, you can see I get a little preview over there in the Detail Section, and I drag this down. Look at that cyan line. It's actually doing a little bit of a warping on it's own, so it's not even drawing a straight line to begin with. So I'll just put that line there like that, and then I'll come over to the other side of the image and go from here all the way down to here. Again, I'm using that preview that you see on the right-hand side to define those edges. Now just by making these lines, it will start to shift things a little bit, but it's not gonna shift things until you tell Photoshop to start shifting this image around. This is where it starts to get kind of fun, and you can sit here for a very long time trying to get this to work. That's why I chose this image for you as your practice image. So if we click right here on this little arrow that's pointing back and forth, if we click and hold on this, notice how it's saying it's an 84.9 degree angle. If I press and hold Shift and move it over, it wants that to now be a 90 degree angle. Watch what happens; the whole image starts to shift over, but making that line straight. If I click on this line, press and hold Shift. Oops. If I click on this line right here and I have that little arrow next to it, press and hold Shift, click on it, then press and hold Shift, and move it over to the left. You can see it starts to make all my lines straight. But it's still not perfect. We've got this side of building is bowing in like this, we got this top of the building, which looks like this. So you just build up, and start adding multiple lines to this, and it adapts as it works. So if we click this side right here and move this over, again, look at that line. You see how it's kind of curving? It already knows that that's a line that you wanna fix, we'll click right there, click and hold, then press Shift, make that a zero degree angle, and fix that. But you're gonna have to do this quite a bit. Go over to this side, click on it, press and hold Shift. Get it to fix. Go to this side, look at that one, they're really bowed out. Click, press and hold Shift. Go to this side, maybe right here. Just work from the outside in. Click on it, press and hold Shift to get a 90 degree angle. Again, this top portion, click right here, move it over to let's say here, press and hold Shift and tell that to be straight. You can sit here all day and do this. I mean we could if, I could do this all day. And you just have to go through and continue picking lines, and as you do that, Photoshop is pretty smart. Look at that. And it will take a little bit of work to get the whole image straight. But know, the cool thing about this is that it is adaptive. As you add more lines, it gets smarter and smarter and smarter. And we'll do one more right here, and then I'm gonna work on the other side. This isn't a one like, oh I'm gonna just make a one line difference and fix this. It's gonna be a slow process. And we'll go over to this side, grab right here. Come to this edge, click and hold, press and hold Shift, straighten that out. This one's gonna be a tricky one 'cause it's so small. Isn't that cool? I don't know about you, but I get excited when I see that. Whoa, look at that! This building was not straight before, but it is now! It's getting there. Whoa, if you go too far though, something like that'll happen. So just make sure that you get 90 degrees, come over here like this, press and hold Shift. We'll do that right here with this one too, that might start fixing this up a little bit. That one's really bad. Have been starting to get in line though, you see that? Pretty cool. I'm just gonna do a couple more, and then we'll hop into Photoshop and I'll show you how you can fix the size again. I'll do one line across here, okay. One more, I just get addicted to it. I can't stop, can't stop! Yeah, okay, so that looks pretty good. We'll just go with that. Know that parts of this are still gonna be a little bowed, still a little warped, but I mean, I could sit here all day and keep adding lines to this to make it straight. The point is, and what I want you to gather from this is that the more lines you add to this, the smarter and smarter and smarter Photoshop is getting about what is not correct in this image, so that you can get that to be much more perspectively correct than it was before. If we go ahead and commit to that, press Okay. Again, this is a smart object. So everything we did in there is contained within that smart object. Let's go ahead and try something real quick. I'm wondering if this is gonna work, 'cause if it's a smart object, I'm not sure it's gonna add anything to it, but we'll see. So click the Magic Wand tool, now click outside here, oh, look at that. Press Shift + F5. Shift + F5! It's not gonna work. So that's one thing I didn't teach you in the last lesson. Certain things are not gonna be available in a smart object. And the reason why is because smart objects, because they are vector-based and they're always calculating what happened with the original pixels. They might not allow you to do certain things, especially like Fill. 'Cause now you're telling it to fill it with information that didn't exist before it became a smart object. It's not gonna allow you to do that. But if we go ahead and just press Command or Control + D, right-click on this, and let's duplicate it first. Command or Control + J to duplicate it, and then right-click and then rasterize. Why I duplicate it first is because now I still have all that information down there. If I ever go back to it, I have that information there, I'm working on a non-destructive layer here. So I'll just go ahead and add that, Shift + F5, and now it works because it's a pixel-based layer, not a vector-based layer, press Enter, and Photoshop is pretty darn smart and fills in those other areas too. Things are still looking a little kind of, I don't know, out of a cartoon here a little bit, but again, just spend a little bit more time on that. This is a practice image, so feel free to use this practice image and beat this practice image up to your liking.