This article will show you how to defish a landscape photo and straighten the horizon without losing too much detail or resolution.įirstly, why would you want to spend the extra processing time to defish a fisheye photograph? Isn’t the whole distortion thing the point of a fisheye? Why not just use a super wide angle rectilinear lens? For the processing examples, I will be using Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop. I will, of course, be using it with landscape astrophotography. It’s especially suited for landscape photographs that have a curved horizon but it’s applicable to other types of photography too. It’s a technique that I’ve seen used only a handful of times by other photographers but the results can be great. I will show you what I regard as the best method of defishing.
There are many methods to defish a fisheye photograph but some work better than others. The easiest way to make a fisheye lens more serious and more appropriate for applications like landscape photography (or landscape astrophotography) is to “defish” the image. The curved horizon, and the curved roadway are distracting. In the example above, I think that the fishiness detracts from the content of the photo. Fishy curved horizons can be a distracting element of an otherwise great photo. Now if only that darn horizon wasn’t so curved and fishy. The large field of view that they offer allow us to not only see a huge amount of the night sky but also let us use relatively long exposures, up to 60 seconds without significant star trailing. I would like to convince you that a fisheye is not just a specialty lens for rare occasions or funky portraits, it’s a serious photographic tool that deserves a place alongside your other, certainly more often used, “more serious” rectilinear camera lenses.Īccording to Wikipedia, the fisheye lens had its “first practical use was in the 1920s for use in meteorology to study cloud formation giving them the name ‘whole-sky lenses’.” As a result, they’re excellent for photographing the night sky and that’s why they interest us at Lonely Speck. The more common use for the fisheye lens: the silly portrait. As a result, it’s a lot easier to just take silly portraits with one than try to make any “serious” photos. Fisheye lenses are rarely used for landscapes because of their tendency to curve the horizon if not perfectly centered, thus making the distortion the most attention grabbing part of the photograph. It is a lens that rarely sees itself mounted to your camera, either staying in your bag or sitting on the shelf and collecting dust. Fisheye lenses often scream “Distortion!” and as a result, the fisheye is considered a specialty lens by most photographers. The fisheye lens is typically pigeonholed into a few specialty uses: things like action sports photography (made especially popular by the GoPro), underwater photography, and the occasional distorted portrait.
I’ve owned the earlier version of this lens and I have used other fisheye lenses in the past but never thought seriously (until now) about the wide distorted photos that they made. I recently purchased the new Rokinon 8mm f/2.8 Fisheye II lens that was just released for mirrorless cameras. This article and video tutorial will show you my favorite way to defish a fisheye photo and how to use your fisheye lens as a serious landscape tool.
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