Fix Images of Buildings (Lens Problems)?

Lens problems happen quite often, but they’re generally the most obvious in photos of buildings (especially when they’re taken with a wide-angle lens), where you see a building bowing out or leaning back. Anyway, fixing it is usually just two clicks: (1) Go under the Filter menu and choose Lens Correction. (2) In the Auto Correction tab, make sure the Geometric Distortion checkbox is turned on (as seen above left)—this has Photoshop look through its built-in database of lens correction profiles and, if it finds a match (and there’s a really good chance it will), it fixes the lens distortion. In the Search Criteria section, if it found a profile for your camera/lens combination, you’ll see the make of your camera and the name of your profile. If you see Choose a Camera Make, that’s your cue that it didn’t automatically find one. The good news is, generally, all you have to do is choose your camera make, and suddenly it figures out the lens (go figure). Anyway, if you need to tweak anything manually after that, click on the Custom tab, where you can tweak everything from the bulging (Remove Distortion) to rotation and the leaning back problem (Vertical Perspective). This is going to sound really simplistic, but it works—just drag each slider all the way to the left, then all the way to the right, and you’ll quickly see what each does and how it affects your image. Now that I’ve said all this, the Lens Correction filter is not my first choice to fix this. I would fix this problem using Camera Raw's Lens Corrections (see Chapter 3) because it has the Automated Upright feature that fixes a lot of this stuff for you automatically. But, if you don’t want to use Camera Raw as a filter, then this would be your next best bet.