Is stretching in wide-angle photos normal?

Question

I just bought Sigma 10-20mm lens. Took a couple of pictures of my front yard and at 10mm my car turned out quite stretched (looked funny) in them. I was wondering if it is a normal effect for wide-angle lenses or is it more of a defect. If it is normal, how can it be corrected in Photoshop? Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, it's not uncommon at all for wide angle lenses to cause distortion of the image. Instead of using the wide angle lens, you're better off shooting with a little bit longer focal length and standing farther back from your subject.

Answer 2

It is impossible to capture a wide-angle view without some odd perspective effects. The natural perspective of such a lens is such that straight lines will appear to curve (fish-eye effect). Many wide-angle lenses are designed with a deliberate amount of distortion (magnification varying with angle) to produce a more "correct" appearing perspective. The unavoidable side-effect of this is that objects near the edges of the frame appear stretched. It might be easier to visualize what's going on if you think about what a wide-angle lens does when you shoot a straight-on closeup of a face. The person's nose will look unnaturally large. This is not a defect of the lens but an unavoidable artifact of the perspective, the nose being considerably closer to the lens and therefore appearing larger.

In addition, many wide-angle lenses introduce additional distortion (pincushion or barrel distortion) due to design limitations. These *are* lens defects and there are Photoshop plugins designed to deal with them. For the rest of it, you can play with tilt, perspective, and warp controls to produce a more natural-looking perspective, but wide-angle perspective always involves some "distortion" relative to our expectations of a "normal" view.

Answer 3

These lenses are almost like a lens I once sold for a major manufacturer - an encoding lens for cinemascope. If you viewed the photo without the decoding lense, you saw super tall skinny people like you see when you look at movies meant for cinemascope but shown of regular format TV.

There is little real use for these unless you have the need for distorted images. It suprised me that you did not say that the car seemed to be farther away in the middle than it was on the edges. The widest angle lens I have is a Sigma 17mm for my Olympus and I literally bought that for one image that I wanted in Florence, Italy. That, however, did not work. I should have bought an 8mm

Answer 4

It is a little difficult to correct it fully in photoshop, its a bit of a case of your perception of what you see. We use fish eye lenses for virtual tours, the images created are initially round and incredibly distorted, then we edit and create the panorama itself which is shown as a single "moveable" image, distortion is still there, but can be lessened using the zoom, so far, for wide angle lenses, its really down to what you think looks right from the editing point of view. The other points made about using more suitable lenses for what you want are most appropriate.

Answer 5

I hope you weren't expecting a 10mm lens to create flat images, because they won't. I mean even if you use a wide angle camera that produces relatively flat images like a Hasselblad 903 SWC you are going to run into distortion of the image. Rule of thumb if you are using 35mm and you want an image that reflects how we perceive the world stick to a 50mm lens.

Answer 6

Yes, for that lens it is normal.

I have a 16-35mm wide for my Canon and there is no distortion in that lens at 16mm.

I also have the 14 and the 15mm but there is distortion in those lenses. You just have to use that effect to you benefit or crop it out if you don't like it.