Photoshop for Perspective Distortion Correction of Buildings (Techniques)

Taking pictures of buildings can be tricky—sometimes, trickier than you can imagine. One of the factors that make the entire process of shooting buildings tougher is their height. In order to get a clear picture, you normally have to move afar the building. But it is not even possible when you are on a congested street trying to get some pictures of a building. In such a situation, you have only one thing to do, which is to tilt your camera to get the building within the frame and to get the best picture you can get.

However, this brings an annoying issue—distortion which can obviously be corrected using some smart image perspective correction techniques.

The distortion of images when the camera is tilted is a natural phenomenon when wide angle cameras are used. This can happen usually if you are shooting architectures. Professional photographers have the option to use a tilt-shift lens in order to reduce the distortion to a great extent. However, the lens is quite expensive as it is a special lens.

However, with the advent of latest version of Photoshop, this issue can easily be addressed by making use of some of the best editing tools provided by this image editing software.

Look at the following to get more concrete understanding of fixing the distortions in your photographs.

Working with distortion

Distortion is an aberration that makes straight lines to appear curved. This is usually observed when your camera’s focal plane is pointed downward or upward and, the same goes by the name ‘perspective distortion’.

Another type of distortion that happens is barrel distortion that can change depending upon the type of the camera you are using. It gets the name because the distortion makes the pictures look like inflated at the centre region making the structure being photographed look like a barrel.

Wide angle lenses; when used pointing up to capture images that are tall or pointing down, can create quite a few distortion issues. However, these must be addressed, effectively via any of the best photo perspective correction tricks.

So, the question is, how do we fix distortion?

Fixing distortion in camera

One of the ways to reduce the effect of distortion on your image is to make the settings and placement of your camera intelligently such that distortions can be minimized. You have the option to ensure that the focal plane of your camera stays at 90 degrees to the subject you are shooting. In simpler words, you should not tilt your camera while shooting or do a bit of lens distortion correction. Though it is easy for landscape photography, it does not help you while taking images of taller structures, like building and trees—especially when you have no option to move far from the object.

There are instances where you can do nothing about the distortions while getting a photograph. However, in such instances, the only hope you have is a powerful image editing tool that can help you address the issue quire easily. This is where Photoshop can help you; it has all the necessary editing tools and techniques to effectively remove any sort of distortion that might spoil the image.

Fixing distortion in Photoshop

Being the best and a powerful image editing program that Photoshop has come to be, it has quite a few tools, techniques and options that you can make use of, to address the issues of both barrel and perspective distortion.

One of the best and most effective distortion fixing tools provided in the latest versions of Photoshop is the Adaptive Wide Angle tool. Though the tool is an easy and effective one to use, it really needs some practice to get the desired results.

Though one can choose to effectively use transform tools such as warp, perspective, distort and skew, it really consumes a lot of time to make the changes look really blended and natural.

With the help of Adaptive Wide Angle Tool

Once you have opened the image that you want to fix, open the Adaptive Wide Angle Tool from under the filter menu. Depending upon your requirements, scale the image to get you the best feel of the image.

You may also do the same with the auto-correction tool to get the results, but if you prefer, you can do the adjustment manually as well. While trying to make use of the tool for providing any of the specific real estate photo editing services or any other perspective correction or editing, you need to first identify the areas or lines where you feel the distortion has happened.  

You can now use the Constraint tool; click on the same and draw a line from the top of the image to the bottom of it upon the area that you think is distorted. Photoshop will create a straight line as you have drawn on the image. It will then try to correct the barrel distortion, if any, for the better. However, the lines that were drawn will continue to be skew.

Also, at the bottom of the lines on the image, you will be able to see three line with descriptions; Vertical, Horizontal and Arbitrary. You are required to use any of these—or all of them—to correct the distortion.

If you are trying to fix a vertical wall with image perspective correction Photoshop technique, click on the vertical and the program will make the wall into the correct upright position that it must be. However, the job is far from over. In doing so, you may observe that some other horizontal areas of the image might have been distorted, as well. Now, click on the horizontal to make the distortion get corrected by Photoshop.

You need to repeat the procedure as much as required till the image appears to be having no distortion at all. While making the selection, you can, if you would like, use the 100% zoom window present on the window.

Once you have processed a couple of vertical and horizontal distortion corrections, your image will start to look like a perfect image without any sort of apparent distortions. You can carry out all the required corrections and save the same. Once that is done, it can be opened in Photoshop for any other type of editing that you want to process on the image.

Distortion correction technique can help a lot of photographers who are primarily involved in real estate photography. One of the basic requirements to correct distortions is to practice and get the feel of the same to correct distortions perfectly. Seeking support of professional companies offering real estate perspective correction services and other related image refining services is always advisable.