How to correct lens distortion in Adobe Camera Raw

Before image

Getting a perfectly straight landscape photo isn’t always easy to achieve in-camera. Thankfully, by following a few simple steps in Adobe Camera Raw you can correct this lens distortion and get the perfect vista you were hoping to achieve. Here’s how to do it.

Photoshop effects: how to correct lens distortion in 4 steps

Step 1: Open up in ACR 
In Adobe Bridge, click on the image ‘lens_before.dng’ and go to File>Open in the Camera Raw option to ensure the image is opened in ACR. Click on the Lens Corrections tab on the right of the window to allow you to correct the distortion.

Step 2 Correct distortion
Cliick on the Profile tab then on the Enable Lens Profile Corrections box. This will automatically choose your lens by using the information in the EXIF Metadata, although you can also manually select the Make, Model and Profile from the drop-down menus.

Step 3 Zoom in
Using the automatic Profile has  corrected the distortion in the image, but the horizon isn’t quite straight. To do this, zoom in to 100%, and make sure that the horizon is close to  the top of the window by holding down the spacebar and dragging the image.

Step 4 Level the horizon
Now click on the Manual tab at the top of the screen and use the Rotate slider to move the image until the horizon lines up with the straight edge of the preview window. For our image, we needed a value of +1.2 degrees.

Photoshop Effects: correct lens distortion in 4 steps

Final image

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 17th, 2012 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Tutorials. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a comment. Pinging is currently not allowed.