How to fake the fisheye effect
Some of you, especially those somewhat familiar with photography, may be aware of the fisheye effect. It is normally created with an ultra wide angle lens (or a fisheye lens); the end product is a somewhat barrel distorted photograph. This fisheye effect, when desired, is ultra cool—the price tag attached to such fisheye lenses, not so much.
Here is the fisheye effect in action:
Photographer: Jesus Arellanes (via Flickr)
Here is the fisheye faked:
Faking the fisheye effect is surprisingly easy; all it takes is three simple steps in Photoshop and you’re done. Here’s how you do it.
How to fake the fisheye effect in Photoshop:
1. Choose a photo that would be suitable for this kind of distortion.
For some photographs, this kind of barrel distortion won’t look good. For others, it will flatter it. Pick a couple photos you think would look good with this kind of effect and play around with it.
Here is my original photo:
2. Open your photo in Photoshop. Duplicate the photo layer.
Open up your layers window if you don’t have it open already by going to Windows > Layers. You will see something like below in Fig. 1.1.
Next, drag that layer (the selected on in Fig. 1.1.) to the little icon on the bottom of the layer window next to the garbage can. This is the duplicate layer icon. Once you have duplicated your background layer, your layer window should look something like Fig 1.2:
Fig 1.1
Fig 1.2
3. Begin the warping.
Make sure you are on the duplicated background layer by highlighting it (clicking once on it) if it isn’t already selected. (Your layer window should look like Fig. 1.2.)
Next, go to Edit > Transform > Warp. You will see a grid over your photo.
From here, you have two options: either you can manipulate the warp distortion of the photo yourself by dragging the grid lines around, or you can let Photoshop do the work for you by choosing from its warp types. In this illustration, we’ll let Photoshop do the work for us.
Looking to the upper part of your Photoshop window, you will will see a dropdown menu as such:
Fig 2.1
From the dropdown menu, you can select various types of warp distortion: Arc, bulge, wave, fisheye, inflate, squeeze, etc. Play around with them. For the purpose of this illustration, we’ll select fisheye.
Fig 2.2
Photoshop automatically sets the bend to 50% (see Fig 2.2.), but if that seems to overpowering for you photo, play around with it. When you’re happy with the effect, click once on your photo and hit enter to confirm the transformation.
Three steps and you’re done!
I’ve never tried this before! I will now. I should have known that Photoshop could do this so easily :P
March 4th, 2009 at 6:23 pmThat comes out fairly close to a true fisheye effect – neat :-) I’ll have to play around with that!
March 4th, 2009 at 11:14 pmI gotta say though, despite the price tag, my fisheye was money VERY well spent. It’s my favourite lens by far! It’s given me so much creative inspiration and by using the distortion to my advantage, super unique images that have gotten my work a lot of positive attention. I would probably marry it if I could. ;-)
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kaitikins/sets/72157614823193696/
Hi.
August 2nd, 2009 at 6:40 pmThanks alot for this tutarial, i was looking it for a day.
Hello !
October 6th, 2009 at 10:43 amThanks for the tutorial! Which version of photoshop are you using to do that? because my version doesn’t have “warp” in transformation.
thank u so much :)
May 7th, 2010 at 2:36 pm