What the camera perceives doesn't always match our brain's reality!
Getting rid of fishbowl and other effects that really do change your perception of a great picture

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This picture sequence comes Wayne's Arizona Bike Tour by Wayne Estes.

Wayne wanted to overcome the fishbowl like effect in the leftmost picture. This effect is most obvious when you look at the horizon.

The middle picture is actually a shot that I haven't shown in the photo sequences up until now. This picture shows the results after using a radial correction plug-in with Adobe Photoshop. The white areas are common whenever you use a tool like this.

The third picture shows the final result where the picture has been slightly cropped to get rid of the white space along the edges.

Click to enlarge.

This picture comes from my Another Friendly Tour / Riding the Tailwind Triangle tour journal.

I seem to suffer from an inability to consistently remember to line up the horizon properly when taking a picture.

A tool that I use to easily correct this is the "Straighten" tool. You draw a line and then do a little bit of follow-up cropping.

Of course cropping also means removing some of the picture so taking the picture perfectly in the first place would be a great solution too! (grin)

Click to enlarge.

This picture was also provided by Wayne Estes but this one comes from Wayne's Nova Scotia Bike Tour.

In this case Wayne is showcasing how he corrected a perspective problem using another Adobe plug-in.

Here's a quote from Wayne's email:

"This a picture I took in Halifax on last year's Nova Scotia tour. It shows somewhat obnoxious "perspective error". That is, the buildings appear to lean inward. That's what my eye actually saw when looking up from my perspective. But the brain tends to "see" (and remember) the view without the perspective error. When viewing a photo it usually seems more "correct" when the photo displays what the brain imagined, rather than what the camera actually saw."