Fisheye effect

[Jay]

Hi foks,

I'm trying to apply a fisheye effect to some photographs because the lens I want costs about $5K, so it ain't gonna happen.

I've tried using the PS7 spherize filter and I find it creates a spherical fisheye but does not fisheye the entire picture corner to corner.

Anyone have ideas on how to get a good fisheye effect similar to that a good lens produces?

Regards to all,

Jay

[angue]

Jay,
Maybe if you enlarge the canvas (not the image) then apply the spherize filter and crop, you might get the deisred effect.

Tony

[jeaniesa]

I've never tried it, but my thought was the same as Tony's. Enlarge the canvas, apply the filter, then crop back down.

Jeanie

[CJ Swartz]

Enlarging the canvas does let Spherize act on the whole image -- I just tried it! Don't know if you'll get the effect you want, but it does work. If that doesn't work, try Chuck's recommendation.

[Stephen M]

In additon, displacement maps can do this - but the spherize filter is the easiest way.

The free PanoramaTools plugs have an option to correct fisheye - so I presume you could add it as well (not very user friendly but can offer different interpolation if a regular bicubic distort looks weird).

As mentioned, enlarging the canvas is the key (lighting effects can have similar issues, as do other filters). Problem is that some files are large and hi res to start, adding canvas can hurt if memory is maxed out...although there are work arounds.

Stephen Marsh.

[Guest]

The spherize filter does the opposite of what a fish eye lens does, so that's probably not what you're looking for. Spherize makes the center appear closer/larger and the edges farther/smaller. An extreme wide angle lens like a fish eye, on the other hand, makes the center objects look smaller and the outer rim larger. You could use the distort-->pinch filter to make the center smaller, or the "liquify" filter's pucker tool on Photoshop that pulls the image in toward the center. You might have some luck with it if you play around with brush size and selections, but it might be hard to do over an entire picture. A fish eye lens will pull in parts of the scene that won't even be in your normal picture and spread them around the rim, so it would be impossible to fish-eye a whole picture anyway, but you may have a bit of luck faking it for a center selection.

And yes, a displacement map might work well, if you could find the grid you seek. How about one like the circular graph paper they use for polar graphing...where all the lines radiate from the center through concentric circles? Don't know, just guessing. This info must be on the web somewhere...everything is, after all.

Phyllis

[Jay]

Hi all,

Yeah I have to agree with Pstewart it does seem to have the opposite effect of what I'm going after. I've attached an image and as you all can see I didn't get the effect I was looking for. Of course you all were helpful in suggesting to enlarge the canvas area. This allowed the effect to impact the entire picture but it does turn the picture into a sphere (I guess I should have expected that).

I'll try down loading the trial version of painter as suggested.

Thanks for all the comments.

Jay J