Help: Wide Angle Lens Distortion

I don’t know about you, but wide angle lens distortion is a frequent issue for me.  In fact, it’s probably the #1 problem I have with photos and very difficult to see on an LCD.  So what is wide angle lens distortion?  It’s a form of perception distortion and I think Wikipedia does a better job explaining than me, but essentially it’s caused by the distance and angle at which an image is captured.  If you’re shooting with a normal lens (generally 50 mm for digital SLR) lens distortion will be a lot less of a problem.  I adore my 50 mm, it produces much sharper and better focused images… but it isn’t practical for my style blog photos because I have to be so far away from the camera to get a head-to-toe shot.  So I use my kit standard telephoto lens.  It’s not that good, I know, but I think most of us use these because better glass is so cost prohibitive.

The above photos have thankfully been corrected, but let’s see the original second photo (it’s been cropped and the exposure corrected (experiment with automatic settings gone wrong) but is otherwise untouched):

Whoaaaa.  Yikes.  See the distortion?  It’s my own fault really, I should be more careful not to place the camera badly.  Then I wouldn’t have a tiny little head and a huuuuuge body.  The lens was definitely tilting up toward me when I took this photo, accounting for the majority of of the tiny-head-huge-body problem.  And I was using the 18-55mm at 28 mm, which is definitely at the low end and also contributing to the distortion.

So how do we fix this?

I recently discovered PTLens after downloading and messing around with a bunch of other plugins I didn’t really like.  PTLens is a $25 standalone app (trial version for 10 photos is free!) and plugin for Aperture/Photoshop/iPhoto.  I’ve been using it with Aperture, it pops up nicely within the application.  It’s way worth the money for me, I take a lot of photos of buildings when I’m traveling and distortion is very evident on all those straight lines.  If you take photos indoors and your walls/windows/doors ever look crooked PTLens will save you there too.  PTLens has a database of lenses and their correction calibrations, all you have to do is select your lens and hit OK:

It’ll pick up the camera make and model, and the lens focal length for you.

Just a note: it’s better to work off an uncropped image.  I worked off the original but forgot to get a screenshot, so I reopened the cropped finished image in PTLens and fine-tuned the rotation, giving you the above screenshot.  The grid function in PTLens is far superior than Aperture’s straighten grid (at least to me), so that’s another point for PTLens.

So thankful for this app!  If you frequently have issues with distortion too then PTLens is way worth it!