I'm still fairly new to photography, went out this weekend to gather some texture sample images and haven't really noticed before how much lens distortion I get in my images.

I know how to crop the image and fix slight angle problems for photo references but how do you go about fixing lens curve? Is it just cause I was using a crappy kit lens?

Canon Digital Rebel XT EOS
Lens EFS 18-55mm

Also have a telephoto lens too, but didn't use it today.

go to filter->distort->lens correction and you should be able to remove perspective distortion and stuff. Only in Photoshop CS3 and up though.

sweet thanks

could you perhaps do similar (though maybe not as effective) through spherize?

Anyway, I had read (I think its on cgtextures.com actually...) that the more upper tier or what have you, your lens is, the less curvature it'll have. But I'm even less of a photographer so, yeah.

edit: no I think I'm speaking tripe

Lens distortion

Most lenses distort the image at least a little bit. Barrel distortion is the most common, it makes the image looks rounded or bloated. There is not much you can do about this, because it depends on your camera's lens. If you have a zoomlens then most likely there will be more barrel distortion when you set it to the wide angle mode (for example at 24mm). If you find that your lens has less distortion at 50mm, you can try to take most your pictures at this angle.

It's easy enough to fix the distortion with Photoshops 'Lens Correction' filter, but you loose a tiny bit of quality and it is nicer not to have to do this for every picture you take.

http://cgtextures.com/content.php?ac...ootingtextures

the best way to take these kind of shots is to get the longest lens you can and stand very far away with a tripod.

what I more interested in however is reproducing this effect in 3d for architectural shots.

Originally Posted by hawken

what I more interested in however is reproducing this effect in 3d for architectural shots.

I've used a couple ways...

For a still, export to a panoramic format then crop.

For animation, this is slow but effective. Point the camera in the opposite direction and put a reflective dome in front of it. If there's any text then flip the whole thing horizontally in post.

There are also some anamorphic plugins for various renderers.

Photoshop's lens distortion removal is really nice. I've been able to get most distortion fixed with it.

since you've got a 18-55mm lens just set it to 50mm and don't move it. if you need more or less information in your shot you'll need to move to the right place to take it.
that should keep your lines straight.