photo trick : faux fish eye

i should be getting my work done. but, whatever. seems like updating this is much more interesting, heh. anyway, how did you guys fare in doing some of the stuff i showed in my last tips and tricks? some of my friends have already given me positive feedbacks personally. glad i could help.

last week, a blogger friend, reeva of bellyobsessor YM'ed me requesting a tip on how to replicate the fisheye lens effect using photoshop. (yes, i take requests too apparently) i told her the truth, i didn't know how to do it. but naturally, i don't just give up and throw the towel. when i don't know, i'll try my damnest to seek the solution.

thanks, reeva, i guess. coz if you didn't ask me to find out, i wouldn't know or even bothered to find out. at least i'm learning something new out of this too!

while i know that the fisheye lens is pretty expensive, but it creates pretty amazing pictures. and finally, after a few trials and errors (of course i couldve just asked google, but where's the fun in that?) i figured how to create the faux fish eye effect, with no cost at all.

here's how i did it.

1. first, open a file in photoshop. i chose the one i took during the last family vacation in perhentian-redang a couple of years back (gosh, has it been that long since i went on a vacation?)

2. enlarge your canvas. the way to do it is to crop your whole photo, and then drag the little squares on the corner outward while pressing on the Shift key. and then let go of your mouse button. how big should your canvas be? well, it depends on you, the bigger it is, the more surface it can blow later.



3. now, you'll have a canvas that looks something like this :



4. here comes the best part. go to Filter > Distort > Spherize



5. make sure that the mode is set to Normal, and then move your amount curser to the right, to whatever degree of distortion you desire. (really funny when you do in on a picture with a face, or butt on it). once you're satisfied, click ok.



6. what you'll have will look like this, and then you're gonna have to crop your photo again, to discard the unwanted canvas. you'll lose some of your photo, which i'd like to remind you now although i know it's a bit too late, that this effect will work well on a central-placing subjects. which means, subject placed using the Rules of Thirds won't work so well since most of the sides will be cropped anyway.



8. and tadaaaaaaa!! (as always, i'll remind you again to save as a different file so you won't lose your original file)



9. i tried it on a photo of a person (me, hiding behind the camera). very subtle, i think i only put the amount of distortion to 18. hey, i'm already wide-angled as it is, so 18 is enough. heh.