

Pincushion distortion is, in some respects, the opposite of barrel distortion.

In the image below, you can see my nose looks weirdly huge and my-normally spectacular-face looks like something from a Hollywood creature feature.īarrel distortion is one of the reasons that the best portrait lenses tend to be telephoto lenses wide angle lenses just aren’t very flattering. The biggest problem with barrel distortion isn’t what it does to straight lines in landscape or architectural photos, but what it does to portraits.
#Camera lens distortion portraiture professional
Professional architecture photographers spend thousands of dollars on wide angle lenses that don’t have it for a reason. While it’s possible to adjust it using Photoshop or Lightroom, you’ll never get rid of it entirely, since it’s a property of the lenses you’re using. Let’s look at each in turn.īarrel distortion is the most common kind of distortion you’ll run into, especially if you shoot with wide angle lenses. There are two main kinds of optical distortion: barrel distortion (seen above) and pin cushion distortion. For more on perspective distortion, check out our article on the normal focal length. Optical distortion is distinct from perspective distortion, which is where different lenses with different focal lengths give different fields of view and display foreground and background objects differently. Note how the wooden slats bow slightly, especially as you move farther from the center of the photo. I’ve added some guidelines to make the distortion easier to see. You can see this with the window frame in the example below. What’s actually a straight line in real life might appear curved in your photo. You are most likely to notice optical distortion in your images when you are taking photos of things with straight lines-like buildings. One of the side affects of this is optical distortion. Lenses aren’t just dumb tubes that you attach to your camera they manipulate light in complex ways.
