The Wide, the Slim and the Long of Digital Photography

By Jerry O'Neill, www.photoreporter.com, January 2007

The pros who shoot weddings know that when they’re jammed into the crowd at the reception, trying to include all the important aunts and uncles and friends on both sides of the family in the photo, they need the widest lens they can get. The obvious answer, a fisheye lens, creates photos with distortion of the people near the edges of the frame. But now it’s possible to make those photos look a lot better by using a new plug-in for Photoshop, the Fisheye-Hemi plug-in from Image Trends of Austin, Texas.

Image Trends is basically the same core group of researchers who used to be Applied Science Fiction, which created interesting software like the Digital SHO (Shadow and Highlight Optimization) Photoshop plug-in and Digital ICE (automatic dust and scratch removal) built in to many scanners. So these are people who have a track record of really clever products, the latest being the Fisheye-Hemi plug-in, which they say “produces an aesthetically pleasing image from the fisheye lens.”

The secret is, Fisheye-Hemi doesn’t “un-distort” the fisheye image into a rectilinear one-that actually creates worse distortion of people near the edges, and also cuts image resolution because it discards 28 percent of the pixels. Instead, Fisheye-Hemi uses a unique geometrical correction technique that doesn’t cut the angle of coverage but still gives people’s faces and bodies a much more natural appearance. The plug-in also straightens vertical lines in the photo. It works with the full version of Photoshop and also Photoshop Elements, and it is priced at $29. It’s for Windows only at this point, but a Mac version should arrive very soon.
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