Project 23: Facial Distortion.

As i move into looking at Distortion Tools and techniques the first project looks at easily the most widely know and most seen area of photography where these kind of techniques are used Portrait Photography. We're all use these days to seeing photos of celebrities where they've had a little work done digitally so most people have a little understanding of some of the methods used such as air brushing and now there are even dedicated pieces of software that are dedicated to this process. What I'm about to look at here is only a very basic couple of distortion tools but as ever they can drastically alter the appearance of an image.

Original Wide Angled Image.

Above is the first image I'm given to work on and as the title says its been taken with a wide angled lens which in its self has had an effect on how the subject appears. What the wide angle does is exaggerate in size anything that is nearer the camera so most professional photographs would opt for a medium telephoto lens to combat this problem. If you don't have this available to you there are ways to fix the distortion produced by the wide angle lens and that's what my next set of photos looks at.

Pinch Filter Extreme Distortion 1.

Punch Filter Extreme Distortion 2.




Pinch Filter At 10%.

The first two photos above show the kind of extreme that can be created when using a Pinch Filter. What a Pinch Filter actually does is reverse the wide angle lens effect when the slider is moved into the positive by pulling the centre of the image inwards (2), and when moved into the negative it has the opposite effect (1). What soon becomes clear when playing around with this filter is that it's only very small amounts of positive movement needed to correct the distortion so in the final image above where I've added only 10% you can see that the face appears much more in proportion so that the eyes and nose don't appear larger then they actually were.

For the next stage of this project I'm asked to use a portrait of my own and experiment with the Pinch and Spherize filters so as to gain more experience with how they effect the proportions of the face, the image I'm using above already to me looks strange in that the head and feature look over blown so now I'm going to look at how the filters effect it and if they improve it.

Pinch 25%.

Pinch 50%.

What the pinch filter does is to reduce the size of the features such as the eyes and nose but doesn't appear to alter the head size. What I've ended up with is something that almost creates a cartoon stile effect of the subject, especially in the final image.

Spherize 20%.

Spherize -10%.

When the Spherize filter is used in a positive manner it only increase the distortion making things appear even larger then ever, but what i did find was that when used in the negative at only 10% it reduced the distortion to the point that it appeared the natural and improves the overall look of the person.

In today's world in which how you look is very important for many reasons you can understand why these kind of tools are an important part of a portrait photographers arsenal and understanding the distortions that some lens create is very important. I guess people weren't lying when they said the camera can add 10 pounds.