To compensate, move the Rotate slider back to +2.9. That’s looking pretty good, though the change to the Horizontal slider has very slightly moved the angle of the horizontal lines in the image. The plane of the building starts to look squarer as you move the slider left of centre. Move the Horizontal slider left and right to see what effect it has on the image. For the time being, just pick a number in the middle, say -40. The setting that works best for the right side of the image is about -31, while -51 seems to be best for the left.
At this point, you’ll find that it’s not possible to get everything right. Drag the Vertical slider left to a point where the towers on the left of the image and the windows on the right of the image begin to look more upright. We can use the Vertical slider to help reverse the convergence of the vertical lines in the image. Note: If you need to zoom, simply click on the image. You don’t have to be too precise here – close enough is good enough for now. Drag the Rotate slider right to turn the image right and level the horizontal lines in the image. Note that a grid appears over the image as soon as your cursor moves over any of the Transform sliders, making it easy to see how much correction is required.
Be aware though that the Scale setting does actually resize the image, so be careful not to reduce it any more than you need – in some cases you may find it best to reset it to 100 once you have finished with the Transform sliders. This will make it easier to see what’s happening when we start manipulating the shape of the image. To make it easier to see what’s going on, move the Scale slider left to a setting of 87.
Still in the Lens Corrections panel, click the Manual tab to bring up the Transform sliders. This simple step removes the characteristic lens distortions for this particular camera-lens combination, though we still need to manually remove the perspective distortion.
Click Profile and make sure the checkboxes Enable Profile Corrections and Remove Chromatic Aberration are ticked. Scroll down the panel on the right until you find the Lens Correction controls. This frees up some screen real estate and makes it easier to see what you’re doing. Before you make any changes click the arrow on the left of the screen to hide the panel on the left.
Press the D key on your keyboard (or click Develop at the top of the screen) to open the image in the Develop module. The image now appears in Lightroom’s image library. In the import workspace locate the image you downloaded in the previous step and click the Import button. Open Lightroom and in the main menu choose File > Import Photos and Video. Note the convergence of vertical lines at the top of the image. (Note: If you prefer, there are similar controls in recent versions of Photoshop CS – go to Filter > Lens Correction.) We can minimise that using Adobe Lightroom’s Lens Correction controls. This image was photographed with a wide-angle lens at ground level, which has has introduced a fair amount of distortion and strong converging verticals.
Rating: Intermediate 01 DOWNLOAD START IMAGEĬlick here to download the free start image.
In this step-by-step image-editing project Managing Editor James Ostinga explains how to reduce lens distortions and boost the visual impact of your compositions.