Rangefinder Magazine
December 2005

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Photoshop CS2 How² Eddie Tapp
Transforming your Work Can be a Thing of Beauty

Model: Stephanie Hufford, Images © Copyright Eddie Tapp

Thinking in perspective… At least a photographer using a 4x5 view camera will do just that, not only think in perspective as to how the lens and film plane controls need to be set to correct perspective and focus, but the fact that using a view camera, you would see the entire world upside down, a strange but cool feature that has been replaced with digital cameras seeing the world right side up.

As more photographers convert to digital cameras, such as Canon, Nikon, Fuji, Phase One and others to replace view cameras, the task of controlling perspective has been given over to Adobe Photoshop. And up until Photoshop CS2, the only real means to control the perspective has been to use the Free Transform command— hold down the Option or Alt. key, select a corner point, and create the perspective plane. Truth is, this still works perfectly well in CS2.

An awesome new feature in Photoshop CS2 is the Lens Correction filter, located under Filter > Distort > Lens Correction. In the next few pages we’ll look at some of the features of this amazing filter and how easy it is to control your perspective.

On a recent location shoot with dancer/model Stephanie Hufford, seeing her shadow on this building was stunning at first sight. Using the Canon EOS-1D Mark II, along with a 17– 35mm lens, the exposure was 1/640 at f/9, ISO 250, and the focal length was 34mm. Even though most of the images were very exciting, this one in particular became my favorite. As soon as I framed this image, I knew the Len Correction filter in CS2 would allow me to quickly correct the perspective.

You can access the filter by using the menu Filter > Distort > Lens Correction.

In the upper left corner are the tools, which include, at the top: the Remove Distortion Tool— here you can click and drag the mouse to or from the center of the image to correct pincussion or barrel distortion, or to actually create a distortion for some very cool effects.

The second tool is the Straighten Tool, where you draw a line and the image automatically straightens (by rotating the image) to new horizontal and vertical axes.

The third tool is the Move Grid Tool. Once you select Show Grid (at the bottom of the interface along with the grid size), you can move the grid to line up more closely with your desired position for greater precision.

On the right side of the interface are the controls for Removing Distortion (same results as the Remove Distortion Tool), Chromatic Aberration (controls color fringing near the edges of an image caused by a lens), and Vignette (also for lenses that create a dark or light vignette at the corners of images). If you have a particular lens that consistently needs these controls, you can set an adjustment as a Lens Default.

Finally the Transform sliders give you perspective controls for Vertical and Horizontal Perspective, an Angle control that works as the Straighten Tool, but allows you to move the angle from the circle or even type in the angle amount. The Edge option allows you to control the transformed edge to transparent, background color or extend the edge (retouching may be needed here), and with the Scale control, you can scale for cropping.

All of these controls result in an excellent rendition of pixel quality.

Step 1: First select Show Grid and the grid size by using the Vertical Perspective slider in the Transform area. A slight adjustment allows for a quick and easy fix for the perspective of this image.

At this point, use the Edge options to determine which would be best way to extend the edge. Background Color replaces the transparent area with your current background color. Edge Extension samples the pixels at the edge of the image and extends the color and tone. This actually works very well with solid colors, but because of the texture, I decided to use the Tranparency option, and extend the edge using the Clone Stamp Tool after processing the Lens Correction filter and cropping the image in Photoshop. When working with this filter, try using the Horizontal Perspective slider, as it will yield some very interesting perspectives.

Step 2: In the next step, the Clone Stamp Tool worked perfectly to rebuild the top, left and right sides of the image, and then I used the Crop Tool to crop the image to create the final composition.

Step 3: For the final touch-up, Photoshop’s Patch Tool came in handy to clean up the walls and other areas. Select the Patch Tool and in the Option Bar select Source, and uncheck Transparent (if it is checked). Create a selection with the Patch Tool (works as if using the Lasso Tool) around the area that needs retouching such as the areas in this image that were blotches on the wall, floor and edges.

With the active selection you can position the cursor inside the active selection, click and drag the selection to an area you want to patch with. Photoshop will show you the source area as you move your mouse. (This is especially helpful when aligning one edge to another as in the example above.) When you let go of the mouse, it will automatically blend the texture and color

Right: Original shadow image at right Below: Final composited image