Correcting lens issues with lens profiles

- I showed you a couple of quick things about lens profile corrections, but let's dig a bit deeper into the options. We'll work with the last file that we merged. And go over here, in the tab, and scroll down to Lens Corrections. The first tab is Basic. Here you can enable Profile Corrections. And if there's an embedded profile that's recognized, you'll notice here that it actually found one, because I was shooting on a lens and camera combination that was build into Lightroom. Well, some of that distortion at the bottom edge is fixed.

Notice how the seal there has been stretched out, and we've restored the rounded shape a bit. And some of the vignetting at the corners has been removed. Additionally, you could take advantage of things like Chromatic Aberration, Now, this is a bit difficult to see, but if you go into areas of high contrast, sometimes you'll notice Chromatic Aberration. This particular image doesn't seem to have any, but we can toggle it on and see if there's any fix. No, doesn't look to be needed, but if you're dealing with high-contrast situations, particularly dark areas with backlighting, this can come in handy.

Now beyond this, let's just zoom out for a second. And take advantage of Upright. I'm a big fan of doing a balanced adjustment there. And you'll notice comparing the before and after, it did a nice job of leveling my tripod. That feels pretty good, but I'd like to crop the image a bit too. So let's take the Crop tool, and move past this out-of-focus pillar. You notice there that the crop has been constrained. Now if you don't want that, you can always unlock it, and have more flexible control.

All right, that works well. Now I'll press the return key to apply it. We have a strong, vertical image. All right, we'll go back to the Lens Corrections area, and notice we have a few additional choices. Under Profile, it tried to recognize the lens and camera combination, which is great. You could additionally refire that a little bit with the vignette controls if you feel that the edges have additional darkening. But it looks like the default values work pretty well. The Color section is where you can remove that Chromatic Aberration.

And this allows you to sample the color, or go after the purple and green fringe that tends to pop up. Now, this particular image does not seem to have that, so I'll leave that as-is. But the important option here is Manual. In this particular case, even though we fixed it, I feel like there's a bit of a bend here that's distracting. By dragging the Distortion slider, notice I can compensate for that. And this allows me to remove some of that.

Additionally, we can play with Vertical Distortion, tilting the image forward and backwards, a little bit of Horizontal tilt if needed, and you see how the image is tilting in 3D. And Aspect will stretch the image to the side, or upright, allowing you to refine things a bit. Now, this makes some subtle adjustments. But I find that by playing with these Distortion sliders, you can get it so your vertical lines truly look vertical.

And then follow up just a little bit with the Aspect slider if needed, to restore the proper stretch. That feels pretty good, let's take a look at a side-by-side there. And I like the changes that we've made. Just gonna back that off slightly, feels pretty good. And I like how the straight lines have been straightened, and the image just feels to be a little more powerful to me, with strong verticals as opposed to sort of bowing verticals here.

But this is all very subjective, but it's the Fine controls in the Lens Correction that really give you those benefits. After all, you're still working with a raw file, giving you that great flexibility to refine the image. A small post-crop vignette there takes advantage of the new cropping of the photo, and darkens the edges just slightly. And I feel that the overall image is looking pretty strong. Remember, we of course have all the same controls you're used to, Clarity, the ability to refine Exposure, lift Shadows, work the Whites and Blacks within the photo to your liking, and of course, the ability to add in some color.

All of these controls are pretty powerful, and we'll explore more of these in just a second.