Photoshop - Adjusting for pincushoning and barrel distortion

[SSonnentag]

Is there an easy way to adjust for pincushioning and barrel distortion using Photoshop?

[Tom V]

No and Yes.

No you can't do it just with Photoshop. Photoshop's distort and spherize filters won't do it.

Yes you can do it with a plug-in in Photoshop. Some are 1-trick deals that only work on the pincushion and barrel distortion, others tackle many corrections at once. It is better to do as much "distortion" of your image at one time as is possible. (ie: correct perspective, rotation, distortion, scale, etc. all at one time, so the data is interpolated as little as possible. It is better to do it once, rather than individually for each correction.)

There are several different plug-in programs that can do it. I have read some reviews about a few of the programs, and they do what they say. Price can vary from cheap to expensive. I have no idea which is best or cheapest.

I did a Google search and found a lot of links to software.

http://www.dpreview.com/learn/Image_Techniques/Barrel_Distortion_Correction_01.htm

http://www.dlynnwaldron.com/ImageAlignPro.html

http://www.imaging-resource.com/SOFT/LDOC/LDOC.HTM

My Google search was for: pincushion barrel distortion correction plug-in photoshop

[memobug]

Price can vary from cheap to expensive. I have no idea which is best or cheapest.

Helmut Dersch's Panorama Tools are the cheapest, because they're free. Might very well be the best, too! The problem is his site tends to get taken down from time to time. I think it is because IPIX keeps trying to sue him, and failing - I hope! At any rate, he has some good stuff there when that page is up.

I think it's off that first link you posted, but they left out the main page, which may or may not be available:

http://home.no.net/dmaurer/%7Edersch/Index.htm

The specific answer about how to correct barrel & pincushion is in the FAQ:

http://home.no.net/dmaurer/~dersch/FAQ.html