Shape up your shots

Alter optical and geometrical characteristics to fix photographs

Jason Parnell-Brookes shows you how to make lens changes and alter perspective using the Optics and Geometry panels ll lenses have their own quirks and physical characteristics that distort the field of view and alter the edges of the frame in a shot. Telephoto lenses tend to darken the edges of the frame and increase pincushion distortion. Wide-angle lenses, on the other hand, distort the perspective of photos and introduce barrel distortion, while central subjects are accentuated.

In this tutorial we’ll go through two panels in Lightroom CC: the Optics panel and the Geometry panel. The Optics panel will take care of things like chromatic aberration – purple or green fringing at the edges of pixels where light meets dark, and the Geometry panel will compensate for barrel or pincushion distortion, as well as allowing you to manually adjust vertical or horizontal lines. Some parts of this process are automated, like the lens selection in the Enable Lens Corrections box, and do a good job at adjusting the image. But there are also manual adjustment sliders that you can change in order to fine-tune your selection. This is handy for architectural images, but don’t be fooled into thinking that is its only useful application.

Any image with sufficiently distorted perspective or heavy vignetting requires some attention. The photo we have here was taken on a 70-200mm f/2.8 so it has pincushion distortion (the middle part of the frame ‘falls away’ from the lens, and also a darkening around the edge of the frame (vignetting). It’s time to make some adjustments and clear up the shot, follow on to learn how.