In this Lightroom tutorial we help you set up and apply lens profiles in Lightroom to automatically remove unwanted lens distortion, colour fringing and more.
What you see with the naked eye isn’t always what you get in a photo. When shooting with a wide-angle lens, for example, the edges of the frame can become distorted, with lines appearing curved instead of straight. This barrel (outward) or pincushion (inward) distortion is especially noticeable when looking at architectural photos.
Cheaper lenses can also add colour-related artefacts to a subject. When faced with a high-contrast edge (such as a white swan against a dark blue lake), you may find fringes of purple at the edges of your subject.
This chromatic aberration, as it’s known, is caused by the lens’s inability to focus different wavelengths of light onto the same spot on your camera’s sensor.
Also, when you zoom out with your lens to capture a wider view of a landscape, the frame can become darker at the edges and corners. You’ll also notice darker edge colours and tones when using a wider aperture.
This vignetting effect occurs because different amounts of light are entering the edge of the lens compared to the centre, causing the corners of the image to become incorrectly exposed.
Fortunately, Lightroom’s Lens Corrections panel has all the tools you need to counteract barrel and pincushion distortion, chromatic aberration and vignetting.
Thanks to its collection of Lens Profiles, Lightroom can counteract these problems automatically, so that your photos will look more like the scene did when you saw it with the naked eye.
1 Add a grid
Import your start image into Lightroom’s Library. To see if lines are distorted, it can be handy to summon a grid. Go to View>Loupe Overlay and click Grid. Hold down Cmd/Ctrl and click and drag on the Size and Opacity options to customise your grid to suit the photo.
2 Read the metadata
Toggle open the Metadata panel. You can see that a 20-35mm f/2.8 lens was used to take this photo. The focal length was 22mm, and the camera was a Nikon D700. Lightroom can use this data to work out where the distortions will occur, and then counteract them.
3 Set up a lens profile
Click on the Develop module. Open Lens Corrections. You could go to Manual and drag the sliders to correct distorted lines, but for quicker, more precise corrections click on Profile, tick Enable Profile Corrections, and in Lens Profile, click on Make and pick Nikon.
4 Compare versions
The Lens Profile command reads the photo’s metadata and then automatically selects the appropriate lens from Lightroom’s list of lens profiles. Toggle the Enable Profile Corrections box on and off to see how the profile counteracts the original photo’s distorted lines.
5 Remove vignetting
You can fine-tune the results by dragging the Distortion slider, although the profile should do a good job. Toggle the correction on and off and you’ll also notice that the original corners are slightly dark. The profile lightens them to match the rest of the scene.
6 Remove fringing
If you go to the Color tab you can turn on Remove Chromatic Aberration. This counteracts colour fringing around high-contrast objects with a click. Fine-tune the results by using the eyedropper to sample unwanted fringe colours, then adjusting the Amount slider.
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