fisheye

GoPro’s HD Hero 2 action camera is everywhere, so perhaps we’ll all be used to the fisheye’d images it produces soon. On the other hand, there are software solutions to rectify the image to rectilinear. Vimeo user Peter iNova has a few videos demonstrating his Photoshop action sets to straighten out an HD Hero’s output.

A person could probably significantly improve performance by giving up on Photoshop and building a video filter based on the Panotools image manipulation library.

My real interest is in correcting still photos, so some of the Panotools derivatives can help me out of the box. LensFix is a classic, but the developer has closed up shop for the time being. A little more searching led me to PTLens. Twenty five dollars buys the plugin, and a few moments with each photo will get rid of the fisheye effect.

The GoPro cameras aren’t among the list of supported cameras, but that looks like it can be resolved.

Bendy horizons are interesting a few times, but I hope soon I’ll be able to straighten them out. And, given that some cameras do this in firmware, perhaps the next GoPro camera will have the feature built-in.

Flickr blog I discovered the Peephole fish eye group. The idea is simple: us a $5 door peephole to give your camera a fisheye lens. Here are the instructions:

1. Hold peephole against rim of camera lens.
2. Set camera to “macro”. (the image is actually displayed on the inside face of the convex lens of the peephole. The camera must focus on the foreground image rather than the background image.)
3. Zoom in to the point that the viewable “circle” is framed almost evenly.
4. For best results, brighter lighting will avoid unwanted noise (grain)
5. Enjoy and have fun.

You can buy a pricier model with the Lomo label on it (and if you go looking, you’ll find a “peephole reverser” which is probably useless for your photography…probably). Henry Gordon Dietz offers a lot more info.

Above is my first experiment with a peephole fisheye and my cheap video camera.