Perspective Correction on wide angle shots?

[andrew99]

Not sure which section to put this one in! Just wondering what your opinions are of fixing the perspective on wide angle shots (you know, that look of the buildings leaning backwards when you tilt the camera up, etc).

I have this shot, which is taken at 10mm with my Sigma 10-20. Since the camera was pointing down a bit, the windows look like they are getting narrower near the bottom. I fixed this in Gimp, but I can't decide which shot I like better, the original, or the fixed one. The original seems more dramatic to me. Also, on the fixed one, the bottom of the frame looks a little bit stretched or something, plus it seems to lose the drama of the wide angle lens, and there is a side effect of losing some of the shot when fixing it.

Anyway, I'd be interested to hear what you guys would do with a shot like this and do you usually correct the distortions of wide angle lenses.

Here is the original, followed by the corrected version:

[Big Mike]

I like the corrected one here...but just as often, I prefer uncorrected UWA shots.

[Garbz]

I prefer neither. The corrected one was 2 steps too many in the right direction. The correction was good but now that all the lines are perfect it looks cold, and lifeless, a bit like an engineering plan more than a photograph. A midpoint would be nice.

[Alex_B]

I like them both, just two different images and it depends on the purpose.


anyway, converging lines due to perspective are not something constrained to wide angle shots, you get them (and can correct them) with all kinds of focal lengths.

[shorty6049]

the way i do it (and i almost never do) is just with photoshop's perspective tool in the transform tools. but i usually prefer the uncorrected

[rfulmer]

I would agree with Garbz I think you need to move more to the middle of the two images.

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