If you’ve ever taken a photo of a window or side of a building, you’ve probably encountered perspective distortion. I usually correct this by performing basic image adjustments in Lightroom, and then launching Photoshop to fix perspective on the final image. With the update to Lightroom 3 that was released today, Adobe has made it so that I’ll never have to launch Photoshop again.
Thanks to the improved Lens Corrections panel, you can now remove distortion, correct the vertical and horizontal planes, and rotate or scale your images. Select Manual from the panel, and as you begin to adjust your image, a helpful grid overlay appears, helping you to make sure corrections are straight and true. To see the difference this makes in an image, look at the image on the right. The top is the straight out of camera image with no adjustments, and the bottom photo is what it looks like after perspective distortion has been corrected.
I know, right?
This feature has drastically simplified my workflow. No more roundtrip editing, no more wondering whether my aging version of CS3 will bring my MacBook to a grinding halt (because Lightroom runs beautifully on my limited hardware).
Lightroom has long been my preferred image editing program, but with the addition of this new feature, Photoshop is now unnecessary for 99% of the shots I take. You can learn more about perspective correction, lens corrections, and how to control chromatic aberration in this helpful video from Adobe. A free 30-day trial of Lightroom 3 is also available for Mac and Windows.