Making Lens Corrections in Adobe Lightroom

Hey there, everyone, I'm professional nature photographer Ian Plant. And even when your photos are perfect, sometimes your lenses are not. Most lenses will show some level of lens imperfection such as vignetting, chromatic aberration and optical distortion. But the good news is that you can easily fix all three. I'm going to show you some techniques in Adobe Lightroom that will allow you to correct these lens imperfections and make your photos look better. In the most recent version of Lightroom, you'll want to navigate to the Optics section. In older versions of Lightroom, this section is called Lens Corrections. The first thing you want to do is to check the Remove Chromatic Aberration box. Chromatic aberration is a lens imperfection that causes color fringing, especially along high-contrast edges in your photos. When you zoom into 100%, you can see this fringing, which is usually purple or green. By checking the box, you can automatically get rid of the chromatic aberration in your photo. Although some lenses have less chromatic aberration than others, I do this for all of my photos as it is an easy correction and there's really no downside to doing it. The second thing you can do to correct lens imperfections is to enable Lens Profile Correction. Every lens creates some optical distortion and also vignettes the edges and corners a bit, which basically means that those areas of the image frame are a bit darker than the center. When you check the box, Lightroom automatically applies a custom-made profile for the lens, which corrects the optical distortion and the vignetting. Now, I don't always apply the lens correction profile. I only do so if I think that the distortion or the vignetting is detracting from my artistic goals for the photograph. Sometimes, for artistic reasons, I like to apply a slight vignette to my photos to keep the viewer's attention focused within the composition. And I actually like the natural vignette created by the lens. So in these situations, I might choose not to apply the lens profile correction. If I decide I want to correct the optical distortion, but don't like the vignetting correction that's applied by the lens profile, I can always manually add a slight vignette and darken the image edges until they look the way I want them to. So these two simple and easy fixes should be part of your standard image-editing workflow. I always fix chromatic aberration. And at the very least, I always consider whether I want to apply the lens profile corrections. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don't, but I at least give it a try and see what works best. I'm Ian Plant, and thanks for watching.