The Art of Lens Corrections in Lightroom

One of the most common issues photographers face when working with manual focus lenses is lens distortion and chromatic aberration, which can result in unwanted color fringing around the edges of images. To address this issue, Lightroom provides a range of tools to correct for these problems.

To start, I'll demonstrate how to zoom in on an image to examine the effects of lens distortion. Around the bird's head, notice the magenta line that represents the color fringing. There are two types of fringing: one where the color fringing is more pronounced around the edges and another type where it appears as a spot within the image.

As we look closer at the image, we can see that there are areas where both magenta and turquoise fringing appear. This is because the lens is not compensated for these issues, resulting in unwanted color casts throughout the image. To correct this, I'll head to the Lens Corrections palette. At the top of the screen, you'll find a section labeled Distortion.

To correct for distortion, Lightroom provides two methods: manual adjustment or automatic correction using an eyedropper tool. The first method involves moving sliders around the Distortion setting to adjust the image. However, this can be time-consuming and requires a good understanding of how to use these tools effectively. On the other hand, the second method is much faster and more convenient. To access it, simply grab the eyedropper tool and select a color sample from the image where you want to correct for fringing.

Once you've selected the eyedropper tool and clicked on a sample area of the image, Lightroom will automatically adjust the Distortion settings to compensate for the lens's imperfections. In this case, I'll demonstrate how to use the eyedropper tool by selecting a magenta color near the bird's head. Observe how the slider in the Distortion setting moves in response.

Now that we've corrected for fringing, it's worth noting that Lightroom also knows whether you're working with green or magenta fringing. This is important because applying corrections to one type of fringing can affect the other type. To illustrate this point, I'll grab the eyedropper tool again and select a turquoise color near the tree bark in the image.

Notice how the slider adjusts to compensate for the turquoise fringing. This is just an example of why it's essential to understand how Lightroom handles different types of fringing when making corrections.

Now that we've corrected for distortion, I'll demonstrate how to create a preset for this image using the Develop module. To do so, I'll head to the Develop menu at the top of the screen and select New Preset. This will allow me to capture the current settings and apply them to future images without having to make manual adjustments.

I'll name this preset "User Presets" and select a label for it, such as "300 mm f4.5". This preset includes only the Lens Corrections settings that we've adjusted, with all other settings turned off. The idea behind this is to provide a starting point for correcting lens distortion and chromatic aberration in future images without over-adjusting the image.

One additional tip worth mentioning is that you can also correct for vignetting using Lightroom's Vignette settings. This is particularly useful when working with wide-angle lenses, as they tend to suffer from more severe vignetting issues than telephoto lenses. However, some photographers prefer to leave vignetting corrections alone, as it can add visual interest to the image.

Finally, I'll emphasize that creating presets for lens profiles like this one can be a powerful tool in your post-processing workflow. By saving customized settings for specific lenses or images, you can streamline your editing process and achieve consistent results throughout your work.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso I've got a little project going on here today and we're in my living room right now outside this window is my backyard and in the backyard is a large tree to which we have discovered there are five Hawks living in and of course I wanted to get some video and some photos of these guys and so I started to set up my gear and one thing I realized is I rarely shoot with telephoto length lenses and all I have I actually have three lenses I didn't spend any more than $100 on any of these lenses and they are old and they are cheap but they do work uh right now on the camera I'm got my uh Sony a7s and I'm using the Nikon 300 mm f. 4 and I've got some other lenses over here that I've been kind of switching in and out to this is a Canon 200 mm this is an f3.5 and I've got another Canon 300 mm F4 as well now all of these lenses are older and they were designed for 35 mm cameras but they are usable and you can get good results there are a few caveats that you're going to find with these mainly in distortions and how they resolve so what I want to do is go into Lightroom and actually show you some of the stuff that I've got and how you can get around some of these things and more importantly how you can create your own custom presets for lens calibration so come on over and let's have a look so we are in Lightroom right now and as you can see the 300 mm lens did get me up and close where I wanted to be with these birds and I kind of shot throughout the day the other day and as the Sun moved um some shots were a little easier to work with than others uh you know this one the sun was pretty much setting and I got a nice light uh some of these are back lit but more challenging than that was working with some of the distortions that you're going to find in cheaper lenses now with digital cameras and modern lenses often times you have information that the camera is told on how to adjust for some of these things uh digitally and so if I go down for instance in Lightroom to the lens Corrections palette here it'll default into profile now these are manual focus lenses they're very old and there's nothing that's telling the camera what they are so you could see if there's a lens profile in here by enabling them but there isn't for this lens so I'm going to show you how you can make your own now there's no way to actually save them into that panel but I'll show you something else you can do now first let's talk about the two types of distortion that you're going to want to fix one is going to be actual image Distortion and in white angle lenses this is seen as Barrel Distortion and sometimes in really long telephoto lenses this is pen cushion Distortion and so the easiest way you're going to find to to correct for this is on this if you go down here under Distortion it's really hard to see on this image but -3 is about where this lens is set so what you want to do is get an image of something that's more grid-like now this is quick and dirty and this is really not a perfect example for this I would actually want to get back further from this brick wall so I could see the grid lines a little more correctly but this is where you can go into this Distortion tool and even when you Mouse over it gives you a grid to make sure things are lining up as best they can and you can either compensate for Barrel Distortion or pen cushion depending on which way you move the slider now this is not a perfect example um because these bricks aren't exactly even and like I said I would find a wall get further back from it so you can get more of the bricks in there so anything where you can see a visual grid and then you can make those compensation adjustments so my best guess three right here is going to be neg -3 um for the Distortion now the other thing you're going to want to correct for and I'm going to go over to an image that's not corrected at all uh this is as shot um what you're going to want to do is look for color fringing now color fringing is going to happen this is technically called chromatic aberration um rays of light come through the lens and they are narrowed down and focused on the focal plane and so when you have an image in Focus all the Rays of light should be exactly in focus to your ey is going to recognize them as such now what'll happen in cheaper lenses or less expensive lenses is sometimes the red green and blue light coming into the lens doesn't exactly match at the same focal plane uh this is normal and it's very difficult to correct for and that's why um particular with telephoto lenses you're going to get what you pay for and in more expensive lenses there are elements of the Design Within the lens to compensate for this and correct that but these are very cheap lenses and you don't see that so let me show you how you can correct for that it's pretty easy what you're going to want to do is first of all this white balance is not correct so I want to go in here I'm just going to grab the eye dropper and we're going to grab some white on the bird there and correct the white balance a little bit which is much better and the next thing you want to do is I'm going to go ahead and zoom in so if you notice around the bird's head here do you see that magenta line that's what the color fringing looks like and there's two types you're going to see that magenta line and then there are spots in this image where you actually start to see probably down here on the tail a little bit of green um turquoise is fringing as well and that's just you know a byproduct of what you're seeing um through a lens that's not compensated for that so easiest way to correct for this is if I go back down to the lens Corrections palette here you're going to see at the top we were playing with the Distortion underneath where it says defringe there's two ways you can do this you can manually go move these sliders around or an easier way to do it is to grab this ey dropper and what you're going to want to do is go in here and you're going to say pick a fringe color and Lightroom is automatically going to know whether this is going to be purple or turquoise and you can see I just clicked it and it went away and so let me undo that for a second so you can see it come back and that's all I did was just go in there and it zooms in for you but you want to just go ahead and and grab that magenta color and then see it automatically corrects and you can see over here the slider moved as well now what's really cool about Lightroom is that it also knows whether you were correcting for um the green Fringe or the magenta Fringe so let's go ah here and grab the eye dropper again and I'm going to go down here right where this tree bark is hitting I've got a good sample there I'm going to go ahead and click that and you wait a second for photo or sorry Lightroom to do its thing and it went away now you can go in here and get more specific by moving the these sliders around and sometimes you do need to play with the image but when you have something that looks a lot better than what you started with um you basically have corrected the fringing now at this point I would probably go in and continue to do further edits with contrast and levels and all that stuff but I'm not going to yet what I want to do is I want to save this as a preset okay and if I go put more stuff in it then it's going to bring all of that into the preset as well so what you're going to do is go into the develop menu at the top of the screen and at this point what I'm going to do is I'm going to a new preset and it's going to say what do you want in that preset really what I'm going to do is turn everything off in here because I don't want any edits that I've made other than the lens Corrections and I'm going to leave all the lens Corrections turned on and turn everything else off except process version because it wants to know that now one thing I'm going to mention too you could go in and correct for vignetting sometimes particularly wide angles uh will have more vignetting on them uh you don't have as much of a problem with telephoto lenses but this is kind of um probably up to each individual user as to what you want to do it's up to the photographer some people will go in and they will include postc crop vignetting on here as well and they'll try to correct for that um I typically don't because sometimes that's visually kind of pleasing to have in the image and so I I don't mind if that's not corrected but the big two ones for me are dealing with lens Distortion and chromatic aberration and so once you've done that you can label your preset and I've already done this and I have one labeled under user presets and I icon 300 mm f4.5 and all I have to do then is Select that um when I bring up an image and it will automatically adjust for the Distortion in the color fringing so that's a useful tip and then you can go in and do even further work um if you want to and and and get the image looking exactly how you want it but this is a little bit different than a preset yes I am saving it as a preset in Lightroom but it is a lens profile that I have customized so just a helpful tip on that for those of you who especially if you work with manual focus lenses and older lenses um how you can actually go in and save those as a preset if you guys enjoyed this video please remember to like it share it with your friends and as always subscribe to the Art of Photography and stay up to date with all the videos that I produce here I'll see you guys in the next video laterso I've got a little project going on here today and we're in my living room right now outside this window is my backyard and in the backyard is a large tree to which we have discovered there are five Hawks living in and of course I wanted to get some video and some photos of these guys and so I started to set up my gear and one thing I realized is I rarely shoot with telephoto length lenses and all I have I actually have three lenses I didn't spend any more than $100 on any of these lenses and they are old and they are cheap but they do work uh right now on the camera I'm got my uh Sony a7s and I'm using the Nikon 300 mm f. 4 and I've got some other lenses over here that I've been kind of switching in and out to this is a Canon 200 mm this is an f3.5 and I've got another Canon 300 mm F4 as well now all of these lenses are older and they were designed for 35 mm cameras but they are usable and you can get good results there are a few caveats that you're going to find with these mainly in distortions and how they resolve so what I want to do is go into Lightroom and actually show you some of the stuff that I've got and how you can get around some of these things and more importantly how you can create your own custom presets for lens calibration so come on over and let's have a look so we are in Lightroom right now and as you can see the 300 mm lens did get me up and close where I wanted to be with these birds and I kind of shot throughout the day the other day and as the Sun moved um some shots were a little easier to work with than others uh you know this one the sun was pretty much setting and I got a nice light uh some of these are back lit but more challenging than that was working with some of the distortions that you're going to find in cheaper lenses now with digital cameras and modern lenses often times you have information that the camera is told on how to adjust for some of these things uh digitally and so if I go down for instance in Lightroom to the lens Corrections palette here it'll default into profile now these are manual focus lenses they're very old and there's nothing that's telling the camera what they are so you could see if there's a lens profile in here by enabling them but there isn't for this lens so I'm going to show you how you can make your own now there's no way to actually save them into that panel but I'll show you something else you can do now first let's talk about the two types of distortion that you're going to want to fix one is going to be actual image Distortion and in white angle lenses this is seen as Barrel Distortion and sometimes in really long telephoto lenses this is pen cushion Distortion and so the easiest way you're going to find to to correct for this is on this if you go down here under Distortion it's really hard to see on this image but -3 is about where this lens is set so what you want to do is get an image of something that's more grid-like now this is quick and dirty and this is really not a perfect example for this I would actually want to get back further from this brick wall so I could see the grid lines a little more correctly but this is where you can go into this Distortion tool and even when you Mouse over it gives you a grid to make sure things are lining up as best they can and you can either compensate for Barrel Distortion or pen cushion depending on which way you move the slider now this is not a perfect example um because these bricks aren't exactly even and like I said I would find a wall get further back from it so you can get more of the bricks in there so anything where you can see a visual grid and then you can make those compensation adjustments so my best guess three right here is going to be neg -3 um for the Distortion now the other thing you're going to want to correct for and I'm going to go over to an image that's not corrected at all uh this is as shot um what you're going to want to do is look for color fringing now color fringing is going to happen this is technically called chromatic aberration um rays of light come through the lens and they are narrowed down and focused on the focal plane and so when you have an image in Focus all the Rays of light should be exactly in focus to your ey is going to recognize them as such now what'll happen in cheaper lenses or less expensive lenses is sometimes the red green and blue light coming into the lens doesn't exactly match at the same focal plane uh this is normal and it's very difficult to correct for and that's why um particular with telephoto lenses you're going to get what you pay for and in more expensive lenses there are elements of the Design Within the lens to compensate for this and correct that but these are very cheap lenses and you don't see that so let me show you how you can correct for that it's pretty easy what you're going to want to do is first of all this white balance is not correct so I want to go in here I'm just going to grab the eye dropper and we're going to grab some white on the bird there and correct the white balance a little bit which is much better and the next thing you want to do is I'm going to go ahead and zoom in so if you notice around the bird's head here do you see that magenta line that's what the color fringing looks like and there's two types you're going to see that magenta line and then there are spots in this image where you actually start to see probably down here on the tail a little bit of green um turquoise is fringing as well and that's just you know a byproduct of what you're seeing um through a lens that's not compensated for that so easiest way to correct for this is if I go back down to the lens Corrections palette here you're going to see at the top we were playing with the Distortion underneath where it says defringe there's two ways you can do this you can manually go move these sliders around or an easier way to do it is to grab this ey dropper and what you're going to want to do is go in here and you're going to say pick a fringe color and Lightroom is automatically going to know whether this is going to be purple or turquoise and you can see I just clicked it and it went away and so let me undo that for a second so you can see it come back and that's all I did was just go in there and it zooms in for you but you want to just go ahead and and grab that magenta color and then see it automatically corrects and you can see over here the slider moved as well now what's really cool about Lightroom is that it also knows whether you were correcting for um the green Fringe or the magenta Fringe so let's go ah here and grab the eye dropper again and I'm going to go down here right where this tree bark is hitting I've got a good sample there I'm going to go ahead and click that and you wait a second for photo or sorry Lightroom to do its thing and it went away now you can go in here and get more specific by moving the these sliders around and sometimes you do need to play with the image but when you have something that looks a lot better than what you started with um you basically have corrected the fringing now at this point I would probably go in and continue to do further edits with contrast and levels and all that stuff but I'm not going to yet what I want to do is I want to save this as a preset okay and if I go put more stuff in it then it's going to bring all of that into the preset as well so what you're going to do is go into the develop menu at the top of the screen and at this point what I'm going to do is I'm going to a new preset and it's going to say what do you want in that preset really what I'm going to do is turn everything off in here because I don't want any edits that I've made other than the lens Corrections and I'm going to leave all the lens Corrections turned on and turn everything else off except process version because it wants to know that now one thing I'm going to mention too you could go in and correct for vignetting sometimes particularly wide angles uh will have more vignetting on them uh you don't have as much of a problem with telephoto lenses but this is kind of um probably up to each individual user as to what you want to do it's up to the photographer some people will go in and they will include postc crop vignetting on here as well and they'll try to correct for that um I typically don't because sometimes that's visually kind of pleasing to have in the image and so I I don't mind if that's not corrected but the big two ones for me are dealing with lens Distortion and chromatic aberration and so once you've done that you can label your preset and I've already done this and I have one labeled under user presets and I icon 300 mm f4.5 and all I have to do then is Select that um when I bring up an image and it will automatically adjust for the Distortion in the color fringing so that's a useful tip and then you can go in and do even further work um if you want to and and and get the image looking exactly how you want it but this is a little bit different than a preset yes I am saving it as a preset in Lightroom but it is a lens profile that I have customized so just a helpful tip on that for those of you who especially if you work with manual focus lenses and older lenses um how you can actually go in and save those as a preset if you guys enjoyed this video please remember to like it share it with your friends and as always subscribe to the Art of Photography and stay up to date with all the videos that I produce here I'll see you guys in the next video later\n"